Colin said: "One gripe I had, and something that might be
worth discussion was the phoenetic spelling of
dialect/heavily accented speech In Christopher Brookmyre's,
otherwise excellent story. I found it really interrupted the
flow. At what stage is it necessary/acceptable to render
speech like this? Is it not enough to tell us that the
characters have strong Scottish accents? Al will know more, I
am sure, but where does the line between accented English and
Scots' dialect come? I'm not sure if that is really the right
question even, but if anyone has any views I would be
interested to here.
"Or if I rendered my speech as it sounds.
"'Any 'un gort any vews, I 'ud be innerested to yere.'
(Forest of Dean)."
Copyeditors discuss this sometimes. The consensus usually is
the less of it, the better because (1) it's hard on the
reader and (2) it tends to have a demeaning effect on the
speaker. Writers mostly don't phonetically spell out what
Lord High Muckety-Muck says; the marginalized, the poor, the
uneducated, the foreign, and various other outsiders get the
treatment. It's an easy way for the author to signal disdain
for the speaker.
In your example, Colin, how is "vews"
pronounced? When I sound it out, it sounds just like my
"views." Of course, I have a funny accent, too.
Joy
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 17 Jun 2002 EDT