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...I was kind of cringing reading the patois-ified spelling of his words until I read it was the insistence of the original interviewer. That's an... awkward d
by Pxtl 9y ago
...I was kind of cringing reading the patois-ified spelling of his words until I read it was the insistence of the original interviewer. That's an... awkward decision.
- brosky117 9y agoI appreciate being able to read the words the way they were spoken. It doesn’t seem inherently wrong or awkward to me.
- laretluval 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect It's unlikely that this is a true reflection of the phonetics of what he said.
- forapurpose 9y ago> That's an... awkward decision. Journalists make this decision all the time: Do they take out the wrong words, grammatical errors, the 'umms' and 'ahhs', or vernacular, and make the speaker look less intelligent (for errors) or simply look like they are trying to characterize the speaker (vernacular), or do they insist on total accuracy? Note that most quotes in print are in perfect English. Anyway, the article addresses your comment: [Zora Neale] Hurston’s use of vernacular dialogue in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was often controversial, as some black American thinkers at the time argued that this played to black caricatures in the minds of white people. Hurston disagreed, and refused to change Lewis’ dialect—which was one of the reasons a publisher turned her manuscript down back in the 1930s. Note that Hurston was a leading African-American intellectual of that era.
- pessimizer 9y agoI personally hate it. It's the conversion of an accent to another language for the purpose of atmosphere. It's fine when Scottish poets do it to themselves, but when it's done by someone else it's intentionally alienating. Black Southern accents aren't very different from White lower- to lower-middle-class Scots-Irish dialects, but the choice to transcribe "like" as "lak" for an average Southern white person would strike most people as bizarre.
- khazhoux 9y ago> “We [were] very sorry to be parted from one another,” Lewis told Hurston. “We [went] seventy days cross[ing] the water from the Afica[n] soil, and now they part us from one another. Therefore we cry. Our grief [was] so heavy [it] look[ed] like we can't stand it. I think maybe I [will] die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.” Better? But really even without the journalistic [corrections], the tone is still very different from Hurston's original transcription: > “We were very sorry to be parted from one another,” Lewis told Hurston. “We went seventy days crossing the water from the African soil, and now they part us from one another. Therefore we cry. Our grief was so heavy it looked like we can't stand it. I think maybe I will die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”
- GordonS 9y ago> Black Southern accents aren't very different from White lower- to lower-middle-class Scots-Irish dialects As a Scot who has been to southern US, I strongly disagree. There are a number of accents and dialects in Scotland, and not one of them is even remotely reminiscent of a southern US accent or dialect.
- leoedin 9y agoThe guy isn't southern though, he's from Africa and learnt English as an adult. You'd expect his accent to be closer to one of someone from Benin (or perhaps neighbouring Nigeria). It doesn't read too different from the way people from Nigeria speak today.