5 ms·

It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line fr

by defen 10y ago

It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).

coredog64 10y ago
Although that is fairly mild, I've seen authors that butcher the language to indicate accents, making their work unreadable. Introduce the character, mention their accent, and move on with your life.
spacehunt 10y ago
We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead of the correct "墨丸", "腩肉", "三小辣" ("cuttlefish balls", "pork belly", "3rd little spicy").
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  In otherwords, Chinese is "misspelled" for dialect... Just like any other writing system.
aninhumer 10y ago
I don't know if anyone does it, but one idea might be to use different fonts to indicate accents.
schoen 10y ago
Maybe you and the original commenter mean to refer to "dialect" rather than "dialog"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
jhanschoo 10y ago
You can convey provincial language through different diction, and a different frequency of usage of certain words, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle
jcranmer 10y ago
As far as we can tell, all writing systems with independent origins started out as logographs that where stylized representations of the words, and then they started to change by adapting the rebus principle--basically, puns based on homonyms rather than their abstract representation. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Japanese all made translations thence into syllabaries, whereas Chinese remained primarily logographic. Egyptian was borrowed into Phoenician as an abjad (like an alphabet, but no vowels), whence the Greeks added vowels as separate letters, and the Indians readded vowels by modifying the base characters (known as an abiguda), and further complicated the system by stacking the consonant clusters on top of each other. Chinese can represent phonetic systems by a similar rebus principle. One crucial difference is that syllabaries and abigudas tend to work on having one character per consonant-vowel pair, which works poorly on languages like English where consonant clusters can get atrocious (strangsts: 1 vowel, 8 consonants). Many languages tend to limit themselves to CV or CVC (which can be handled by special rules like C₁V₁ + C₂V₁ really means CVC, e.g., Mayan), so it's not so much a problem unless you're trying to transliterate completely different languages. Of course, Latin script has its own problems in transliteration: it's atonal, it relies on voiced/voiceless distinctions (Chinese uses aspirated/unaspirated primarily!), and good luck if you have languages that have four sounds we'd analyze as "h." I'll point out that Chinese script has been used to write other languages--most notably Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian, none of which are related to the Chinese languages. Another problem with Chinese is that, because you can write the same sound many different ways, you can make mere phonetic transcription a political deal. A transcription might happen upon the character for "small" or "stupid" or "backwards," which might not go over well if it's someone's personal name.
- clw8 10y ago
  Mayan is strictly CVC and CV? I always assumed that Chinese remained logographic because of the phonology's quick shift to CVC within a thousand years or so of the script's invention. Reading a lot of Baxter and Sagart's papers and monographs I've come to remember many of the Old Chinese reconstructions, but it would have been a nightmare for a farmer to learn.
  - jcranmer 10y ago

by defen 10y ago

coredog64 10y ago

Although that is fairly mild, I've seen authors that butcher the language to indicate accents, making their work unreadable. Introduce the character, mention their accent, and move on with your life.

spacehunt 10y ago

We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead of the correct "墨丸", "腩肉", "三小辣" ("cuttlefish balls", "pork belly", "3rd little spicy").

jonathankoren 10y ago
In otherwords, Chinese is "misspelled" for dialect... Just like any other writing system.

aninhumer 10y ago

I don't know if anyone does it, but one idea might be to use different fonts to indicate accents.

schoen 10y ago

Maybe you and the original commenter mean to refer to "dialect" rather than "dialog"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect

jhanschoo 10y ago

You can convey provincial language through different diction, and a different frequency of usage of certain words, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence-final_particle

jcranmer 10y ago

As far as we can tell, all writing systems with independent origins started out as logographs that where stylized representations of the words, and then they started to change by adapting the rebus principle--basically, puns based on homonyms rather than their abstract representation. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Japanese all made translations thence into syllabaries, whereas Chinese remained primarily logographic. Egyptian was borrowed into Phoenician as an abjad (like an alphabet, but no vowels), whence the Greeks added vowels as separate letters, and the Indians readded vowels by modifying the base characters (known as an abiguda), and further complicated the system by stacking the consonant clusters on top of each other. Chinese can represent phonetic systems by a similar rebus principle. One crucial difference is that syllabaries and abigudas tend to work on having one character per consonant-vowel pair, which works poorly on languages like English where consonant clusters can get atrocious (strangsts: 1 vowel, 8 consonants). Many languages tend to limit themselves to CV or CVC (which can be handled by special rules like C₁V₁ + C₂V₁ really means CVC, e.g., Mayan), so it's not so much a problem unless you're trying to transliterate completely different languages. Of course, Latin script has its own problems in transliteration: it's atonal, it relies on voiced/voiceless distinctions (Chinese uses aspirated/unaspirated primarily!), and good luck if you have languages that have four sounds we'd analyze as "h." I'll point out that Chinese script has been used to write other languages--most notably Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian, none of which are related to the Chinese languages. Another problem with Chinese is that, because you can write the same sound many different ways, you can make mere phonetic transcription a political deal. A transcription might happen upon the character for "small" or "stupid" or "backwards," which might not go over well if it's someone's personal name.

clw8 10y ago
Mayan is strictly CVC and CV? I always assumed that Chinese remained logographic because of the phonology's quick shift to CVC within a thousand years or so of the script's invention. Reading a lot of Baxter and Sagart's papers and monographs I've come to remember many of the Old Chinese reconstructions, but it would have been a nightmare for a farmer to learn.
- jcranmer 10y ago