"The" was abbreviated to "T'";
"o" was mispronounced "au";
"auld" was abbreviated to "aul'";
"man" was replaced by a word meaning "boy."
Novelists must reproduce the sounds of spoken English in their texts. Vowels are mispronounced and words are run together.
"'Ahm tahd,' said the thick-set man in the mackintosh."
-Ian Fleming, Live And Let Die (London, 2004), 5, p. 39.
(This chapter has an unfortunate title.)
Denis Waller, speaking to Trygve Yamamura, says:
"'...aren'tchu?'"
"'A accident.'"
"'...hunnerds ah miles...'"
"'...awright.'"
"'You hearda Hugo Heiss, haven'tchu?'"
"'...wantchu...'"
-Murder Bound, ii, p. 24.
I have carefully reproduced Poul Anderson's spelling and punctuation.
I was amused by one cartoonist's deliberate miss-spellings of words but find that I have already discussed this in A Comedy Of Meanings.
Yamamura and Walling know each other's names because they read them off the registry cards on their steering columns. How many car owners display registry cards in this way?
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I fear, given my terrible hearing, I have done my full share of mangling English a la Nicholas van Rijn! Albeit, during one of my two trips to the UK, a shopkeeper in London actually asked if I was from Massachusetts! Plainly, he had an ear for accents.
I don't remember ever seeing car registry cards or papers displayed like that. For as I could remember it was enough to keep registry cards/papers in the glove compartment on the dashboard.
Sean
Sean,
For this post, I didn't have van Rijn's malapropisms in mind, more the way ordinary guys like this Waller mispronounce English. Novelists can reproduce the spoken language very well. The narrator of a novel by JB Priestley tells us that, in his childhood, elderly female relatives would peer into his face, then proclaim, "Just sayin', Hilda - lad's image of his mother!" I read that aloud to a friend who responded, "Aye, that's just like life!"
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Well, Old Nick's mangling of Anglic was the example that came naturally to me! (Smiles) And, for me, I recall my father telling me I took after his late brother in looks. And my mother saying my older brother reminded her of her father in looks.
Sean
Paul and Sean:
In one of Len Deighton's spy novels, a Royal Navy senior noncom tells several officers who he's training in scuba techniques that if they mess up and start drowning because they didn't pay attention and learn how to avoid such difficulties, "I'll larf." It takes the narrator a moment or so to realize this isn't the term for some nautical procedure; the man means he'll laugh at the stupid "young gentleman."
Kaor, DAVID!
And that reminds me of how often I've seen in military SF that one of the functions of veteran non-coms was to help educate inexperienced young officers! And, I recall in Niven/Pournelle's LUCIFER'S HAMMER how a former non com who ended up commanding an ARMY reflecting on how he now understood why good officers LOVED their non-coms, because by taking care of so much of the daily routine of army life, they gave officers the time needed for thinking and planning.
Sean
Portraying dialect is always chancy; necessary in some circumstances, but it can easily be overdone.
In the Sten series by Alan Cole and Chris Bunch, one fellow has an extremely thick Highland Scots accent. When he writes a letter to the title character, Sten feels a moment of shock on realizing who it's from, but then laughs at himself: of course, even Alex Kilgour wouldn't write with an accent.
Post a Comment