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So I've been reading a few stories here lately and while i've been drawn in by certain plots, I've been turned off of the stories to the point where i stop reading, by one big problem... vocabulary.
the stories i tend to read are of the teen - college age range, beacause i can relate to those ages, being a college student myself and the thing that turns me off a story pretty fast is when authors have their younger characters talking like middle aged people, it just doesn't fit.
college and high school age peole use a very different set of words and phrases.
maybe it's just me, but stories where the characters don't sound their age are a huge let down for me.
Kate Draffen is a great story that has the characters acting thier age.
i won't give examples of stories that have made me stop reading
Comments
Agree with you, Erin
Twain and Kipling, in the context of their eras, were highly regarded for their universally dignified treatment of humankind -- as well as unabashedly pointing out its flaws. Racist? One might as well call Harriet Beecher Stowe a racist.
I read Orwell's criticism of Twain a couple of years ago. Orwell, a very harsh critic, IMHO, blamed Twain for not quite having the courage to cross a line to make his point effectively (I wonder if Orwell had read his writings on the US in the Philippines?), and for being disingenuous about his Civil War service, but I don't recall anything about racism. I've always thought of Edward Said as a dishonest writer with an ax to grind. After dissecting his "Orientalism," one could make a strong case that HE was a racist.
It doesn't matter, anyway. In this day and age, relying on what one or two critics said while excluding what one's eyes and brain power tells us is a dangerous game if one is after the truth. Anyone who "discovers" that Kipling or Twain were racists after all this time is, in my opinion, unless they have some remarkable new source data, either wrong or changing the meaning of the word.
As to the point on dialect or not to dialect, I agree that dialect has a respected history. Personally, I think Mark Twain went pretty darn close to the edge with his dialects, which he was criticized for at the time, but that's my subjective opinion. The bottom line is whatever works, and if Huck Finn's manner of speaking, or the peculiar speech of anyone's character is more enlightening than distracting, then more power to you. To me, the story is what it's all about, and anything that gets in the way of telling it easily and reading it effortlessly, ain't good. Sure, sometimes the author needs a special phrase or set of words to make a character seem "real," but unless there's really a point to be made, I'm on the easy to read side.
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Thanks
I agree that Twain went as close to the edge of comprehensibility as anyone is likely to be able to do and make it work. But he did make it work and how he made it work is an interesting study. He wrote a scholarly little piece himself (or hisself :)) on the topic, too short and superficial to really be enlightening but interesting nonetheless. Mostly, it was word choice and not spelling that distinguished the various dialects used. I think he counted six or seven, depending on whether one considered generational differences to be dialectical.
Which is what this thread was originally about. :)
But Twain did change how American novels would be written, and to some extent all novels in the English language. Hemingway declared that "Huckleberry Finn" marked the watershed of American literary eras; everything written after Huck Finn had to meet a new standard of merit. Twain made it possible to write dialog in an American novel that one could imagine actually came from the mouths of real people.
If he'd written the same book without sailing as close to the edge of an orthographic catastrophe, it wouldn't have had the same impact. No one else can ever do that same thing for the same reason with the same importance. Twain himself never attempted it again, using much milder and less intrusive indications of dialect when he brought Tom and Huck back in a sequel.
As for the complaint that ANY use of dysgraphic dialect markers makes something hard to read; well, that can be an author's tool, too. Like the dissonance of a tritone, difficulty and ambiguity have their uses. And what is dissonant to one generation is the next generation's trademark sound.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Harriet Beecher Stowe...
>> Racist? One might as well call Harriet Beecher Stowe a racist.
I hate to break this to you, but she has been called exactly that.
Many modern African-Americans (and others) in the USA find her book and her characters condescending, paternalistic, overtly racist, and demeaning, and her signature character, Uncle Tom, meant at the time to elicit sympathy and compassion from her fellow white people, is now a strong pejorative within the Black community in the USA, used to describe a cringing Black man who sucks up to or toadies for the white Establishment.
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Uncle Tom
 
–noun Disparaging and Offensive.
a black man considered by other blacks to be subservient to or to curry favor with whites.
Compare Aunt Jemima.
Origin:
1920–25, Americanism; so called after the leading character in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
-----------
Uncle Tom
n. Offensive
A Black person who is regarded as being humiliatingly subservient or deferential to white people.
[After Uncle Tom, a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
-----------
Main Entry: Aunt Jemima
Part of Speech: n
Definition: the world's first living trademark, Nancy Green, who demonstrated the ready-mixed, self-rising pancake flour created in 1889.
Example: In the image of "Aunt Jemima," the Nancy Green legend lives on.
Webster's New Millenniumâ„¢ Dictionary of English, Preview Edition (v 0.9.7)
Copyright © 2003-2008 Dictionary.com, LLC
Aunt Jemima
 
–noun
Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. a black woman considered by other blacks to be subservient to or to curry favor with whites.
Compare Uncle Tom.
Origin:
1885–90; after the trademarked name of a brand of pancake mixes and associated products, featuring a picture of a black female cook on the packaging.
Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
===============
Harriet Beecher Stowe is not a uniformly pleasant figure to contemplate, even for the anti-slavery movement. She did not, for example, believe that "Negroes" should be integrated into white society, but was an early advocate of shipping all the Black people "back to Africa," and had a remarkably fuzzy idea of where that was, what place Americanised Blacks would have in it, and what impact these "returnees" might have on indigenous populations not exactly pining for their return.
Even at the time, she was criticised by some Black partisans, but the most critical and archetypical attack on her work came from James Baldwin, a Black American writer, in 1949, in an essay called Everybody's Protest Novel, in which he attacked her as obtuse and her characters as incredible.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-name....
Following his example, most Black and many other writers on racism in the USA mostly piled on, although her reputation in the UK has always been more secure. From the very start, she was widely admired because she correctly (in the opinions of most in Britain) identified the vile natures of those savage colonials, and was an Abolitionist besides, a subject upon which the British had pondered much and come up on the side of the angels long before.
To be fair, the English government were wickedly tempted to intervene in the American Civil War on the side of the South, since Southern cotton was a mainstay of their trade in woven goods, but in the end were deterred by the prospect of the unfavourable press and adverse public opinion that would arise if they sided with slave drivers against those trying to free the slaves.
Tough call, though. Greed... Morals... Money... Stars upon one's crown in Heaven. Dang!
They wound up prolonging the war, to some extent, through allowing private investors to engage in smuggling supplies to the Confederacy by sea in exchange for cotton and tobacco, but were ostensibly neutral.
And Harriet Beecher Stowe devoted much of her time and fortune to ameliorating the sorry state of former slaves after the Civil War, and was a tolerably good person. People are products of their times, and it's hard to leap directly from "darkies" as subhumans little better than apes to Manchild in the Promised Land in the space of a year or two. Ms Stowe's paternalism eventually made room for greater freedoms, arguably led to the Civil Rights movement a hundred years later, and was a good thing, all in all.
Notably, Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the very first efforts to depict the slave dialect in the USA, predating Mark Twain by some years. At the time, it was said to be very accurate, and the best bits of Uncle Tom's Cabin have compelling immediacy and show an advamced ability to recreate the reality of master/slave culture and its physical manifestations, the squalor of the slave cabins tucked just out of sight of the Big Houses, and the desperate sufferings they endured. But her book was also informed by her Christian piety, and she all too readily descends into grotesque sentimentalism and intrusive preaching to her imagined audience, so she's hard to read today.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Harriet Beecher
"I hate to break it to you, but ..."
Actually, I'm not surprised that some people have called Harriet Beecher Stowe a racist. When historical figures fail to measure up to modern-day criteria, or if otherwise loathsome individuals meet currently fashionable ideology, they are too often torn down or their faults air-brushed away, as the case may be.
That some people call her racist does not make it right or accurate, it just means that some people are being absurd; this was the point I was making with Erin.
Harriet Beecher Stowe started writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in order to outrage enough people so that slavery might end. 1850 was a time when slavery was rampant in most of the world, in those days not even completely eradicated in certain British possessions, and after two hundred years of this terrible institution, virtually embedded in the South. She wasn't writing for 21st century snobs, but for an altogether different audience, one she knew well, and her message, unlike one that might have been composed today by Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, was incredibly effective. In her own time, she was wildly celebrated for her efforts, not only in America (except for the South), but England, too.
Racist? One must twist the word beyond any rational definition to label her that. Might as well call Wilberforce a racist -- and I'll bet that some people do.
Being black does not excuse one of sloppy thought processes, nor does it make one an unimpeachable authority on any subject, including slavery. I have no doubt that her characterizations offended some blacks, but one has to go back to the audience she was trying to reach, and her ultimate goals, and conclude that she did very well indeed. Naive? She took pains to research her subject, visiting plantations, talking directly to slaves and owners alike, and, knowing that she might have to defend herself someday, took notes and wrote a book detailing it.
In my opinion, someone who calls her a racist because she doesn't pass their standards 150+ years after the fact should know better. She was a revolutionary of her time, one of the prime forces in eliminating slavery in America. Calling her a racist, as if she were some sort of slave owner, is a incredible injustice.
Anyone can say anything they want, but we don't have to swallow it. I'll think for myself, as should we all.
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Depicting evil
My old parish priest used to tell us that it's OK to depict evil, as long as it's depicted as evil.
I have depicted plenty of evil in my stories (read the stoning scene in Journey to Humanity,) but I don't glorify it. If we can't accurately depict the language and attitudes of our characters, we are left writing bland mealy-mouthed mush that's worth little.
The above Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) is borderline because many of his readers would agree with the assessment that nobody was hurt. Still, anyone who doesn't already have that callous attitude is going to be appalled by it.
Ray Drouillard
The Problem With Satire
Satire as an art form is problematical at best; it's so obvious that everyone always knows exactly what you meant. There's no subtlety or ambiguity in it. Might as well hit people on the head with a hammer and tell them it's raining silver dollars.
And God help you if your satire becomes popular and taught in schools as a text. Everyone will understand just what you meant forever. What kind of fate is that for a writer?
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
I agree with you Erin
Particularly about Mark Twain. Twain was a satirist, Huck Finn needs to be read as such. It is an Anti Slavery novel, and yet it gets wrapped because of dialect and the use of words that are not used in polite company today.
And yet, Huck Finn as a character decides that he would rather go to hell then turn in Jim. He knows that by the mores of his times, helping Jim escape is wrong, but he knows that he can not do it, and is willing to accept damnation rather then do so.
That was a very powerful message at the time it was written, not too long after the Civil War.
As for the overall topic, I do not know if I am on the list of writing about young teens that do not sound like teens or not. I try to make them sound like people talking, but I have a story to convey and am much more concerned about that. I will admit on the issue of contractions, I tend to avoid them. In part that is because I do a lot of formal writing for work. Letters and documentation, and as such I have trained myself not to type contractions over many years. It has to be a conscious effort on my part (or many times on Joni W's part -- Thanks Joni!) to add them into dialogue. I do start sentences with But and And in dialogue, and split infinitives and end sentences with dangling participles in my dialogue, because people speak that way.
In an early chapter someone pointed out that Jason was too formal because he used the word Ma'am. Fact is my 13 year old son uses that word, Yes Sir, Yes Ma'am when he is in trouble, which is how Jason used it. (Holly not picking on you, your comment was appreciated!) Of course, he also refers to adults by Mr. and Mrs. Last Name most of the time, although that has been relaxed as he has gotten older.
I am thankful for all those that seem to enjoy what I write, and know full well that there are many who will not, and there is nothing wrong with that. That's why this is a Big Closet, so that there are plenty of stories to choose from.
And for that I have to thank Erin yet again!
Hugs,
Kristy
I'd have missed that, Kristine, if youhadn't mentioned my name.
Another thing I say is that each character may have their own way of speaking.
I grew up using Yes Sir, Yes Ma'am. And using Mr. Miss, or Mrs. (so and so), too.
As far as starting sentences with And or But, I do it too, and have in the past week, while mentioning that according to the 'experts' one should not do so, that I allow irt, and in dialog, do it myself.
As far as Contractions, I encourage them, but do not insist on them in particular, in dialog.
One thing I often mention in editing stories with a teen narrator, is, "I made this change, but your narrator ( or another character) is a teen, so you do not have to make this change. It is your story."
I would make the same comment about a character who was poorly educated. More people, I think, speak less than perfect English, than speak it properly.
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.
Holly
Actually Holly, it was a different Holly lol
I should probably have been more specific, but the person that mentioned the Ma'am as being too formal, to me was Holly-Marie, which I assume is a different Holly. Either way, I did not have a problem with comment. I just know that I speak that way, and my son, mostly because he was raised that way, does as well.
I do try to keep to proper English in prose, but most people just don't speak that way.
Hugs,
Kristy
Yes, Holly-Marie lives across the Atlantic pond from me, not ...
to mention, across the US, too.
I'm in California, she is in Northern Europe.
Deutschland, I believe.
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
Oh goddess, now I'm second-guessing ...
... what i did in No Obligation. *sigh* I thought i did okay, although maybe there were too few expletives and too many polysyllabic words for a bunch of middle schoolers. I didn't think they were too far off when i wrote it, since my son and his friends were either approaching or IN middle school at the time I wrote it, and did not appear to speak either incomprehensibly or with excessive use of words not considered acceptable in mixed company.
On the other hand, my daughter who was in high school at the time, was more inclined to use expletives in casual conversation with her friends, but refrained at home because i didn't want her to make them a part of her regular vocabulary -- it might make job hunting and interviews a bit difficult.
Anyway, I'm curious as to whether my novel is one of the ones Britney condemns for its way-too-erudite teens. Please PM me if you don't want to answer publicly, hon. Inquiring minds want to know.
Randalynn
P.S. - Oh, and by the way, I use contractions both in speech and in writing all the time. I don't think it's more male or female to use contractions. I think it makes me sound informal and approachable when I talk, and makes my writing more accessible and easy to read.
When I edit, I often suggest ...
That a writer use, as Randalynn mentions, different speech patterns for the same person in different situations.
It has become very obvious to me over the years, that most teens use entirely different vocabularies when speaking
with peers away from adult ears,
when in earshot of adults they know,
when speaking with parents and close adult friends,
and often still differently with teachers.
And for that matter, different people, teen or otherwise, will speak differently at any time.
Of course, it can be a pain, both for the author, and for me, as editor, to remember that this character NEVER uses contractions, and that character has certain buzzwords they use regularly, but it does give more personality to the characters. It does mean note taking, by both authors and editors/proofreaders, however.
As to trying to imitate an accent, I say do it, but don't overdo it, just enough for the flavor of the character's speech. And be careful, make sure it is easily understood. Better, is to use words from the characters dialect, that are well known. That give them the flavor without adding incorrect spellings, though a spell checker might still highlight it.
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness.
It usually comes back to you.
Holly
When it mattered to me
Somewhere, I found a list of Male and Female vocabulary words. I don't know if it is that important, and I have pretty much forgotten to check myself lately.
The Female vocabulary words are: with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her, we, should, she, and, me, myself, hers, and was. They are taped to my monitor. In my opinion, female speech is generally more tentative, and colaborative. I generally don't hear much one upsmanship from women, other than short quips.
In my experience, to me, men spend a lot of time building themselves up. Women spend their time talking about others.
Of course, having impersonated a man for much of my life with questionable success, I'd say even existing as a male demands a large supporting cast. It is a thankless task; one that I am unlikely to attempt again. :)
Many Blessings
Gwen
I love your writing
Some of the things that people complain about in other peoples' writing, just blows past me. I don't come here expecting perfection; after all this is not a prep school or anything.
For me, my writing is an emotional safety valve. I do use some coloquial terms simply because they please me. One person said that I need to use more contractions, and I am (I'm) working that, it is not how I really talk; so I'm torn. I suppose that one reason I don't use them much is because that little apostrophe is hard for me to find on the key board.
Sometimes, I think we get a little anal about things. For me, if it is not shooting at me, hitting me, or likely to explode it's not that high on my list. :)
Ma Salama
Gwen
I think the thing about teen dialog...
I think the thing about teen dialog is that it has nothing to do about slang or being 'down with the kids' it's about finding that bit of yourself that is in touch with the weird mix of invincible courage and crippling vulnerability the teens seem to possess. Being a teenager is world's away from being a kid and yet still a long way off being an adult so it's a tricky mix to get right. If I am having trouble with it I often read my dialog out loud (much to the confusion of my housemate), if it sounds right it stays in. Otherwise it's gone.
I'm writing Kate Draffen knowing I wanted to tell a story about Australian teens, something I know a lot about because I was one. I once wrote a story about a married New York couple in the 1920s and you know what? The dialog was atrocious. So, I guess if I have a point it is write what you know.
vocabulary and usage...
While I agree with "both" camps in the use of vocabulary and the relative "age" of the verse in use versus the "age" of the characters who are spouting that verse, I wish to point out a minor point.
How a person or age group may speak is dictated by a number of things. One, of course, is the region from which that individual or group derives their use of language, another is the age and training of that individual or group in the use of the language they are utilizing, a third concern is the "rebellious" attitude which may or may not prevail within the individual or group (for this will certainly effect their use of verbage).
Please note: I do not say any of the uses are improper, nor do I say they are incorrect.
That will only be borne out by time.
Yes, those of us who are more advanced in age than those teens of today, find some difficulty with the word usage and pronounciations offered by those teens. That does not, however, make either their vocabulary nor ours incorrect or improper.
When I was in fifth grade I was expected, as were most children at that time, to have a vocabulary and capacity to pronounce words equal to that of someone who was in their fourth year of college. In other words, I was brought up speaking with the diction and vocabulary of someone twice my age. I thought nothing about this for my peers all spoke this way and had equally impressive vocabularies. As I entered my teens, this vocabulary continued to grow and it was more than sufficient to put many adults to shame at that time.
Word usage shifts virtually every twenty years. How words are pronounced, spelled, and the meanings of those words varies from city to city, region to region, country to country.
Do I have difficulty in producing today's teen speech in my stories? YES! Do I understand today's teen speech? Not always... many of their metaphors and words escape me entirely as I am certain many of mine escape them.
This is an area which I as an authoress find difficult to approach. Perhaps someone who is a teen here and now should also be one of my editors... or at least a consultant to help me translate my "victorian speak" into today's "teen speak".
We are all part of culture, yesterday's, today's and tomorrow's. Let us work together in an effort to reach out to more readers.
There are many greats who have written in the past two thousand years and who have much for us to learn. But who is to say that the next great author or authoress may not come from the ranks of today's teens (and likely will).
The note has been made about Kate Draffen. I find it to be a little difficult for me to read but enjoy it non-the-less (and have told the writer that I do enjoy it).
I have read the comments and this topic has everyone in a great debate and that is good. We all learn from it. I, for one, know my limitations (and have known it since I could coverse with adults at their level of language capacity since I was ten) so should I endeavor to write of teens and attempt to place words into some form of cognizant verbage relative to them today then I should welcome someone who may converse with them in the manner they proscribe to edit my sentences and thus allow me to introduce them to my attempts at literary proclivity.
God Bless You All...
Upgrading spelling
Reprinting old documents: I think those who see a buck in reprinting them will do so. If theres little demand, they wont be reprinted. And the history bufs who are interested in them will just have to relearn what will be the 'old spelling'!
Its highly likely that an upgraded spelling system will be just that, an upgrade. It will not be an entirely new system, as GBS favored. It will be forwards and backwards compatible with our present 'system'. Learners of it should be able to read our present spellings. The objection is a red herring.
As for Chinese characters: They say Chinese are among the best memorizers in the world. And no wonder! They have to learn thousands of different characters. One of the reasons for the developments of alfabets was to get over this problem. Learn a small number of signs and what they stand for, and then combine them in different designated ways to represent different words.
Unfortunately for us, English spelling has been allowed to degenerate to the extent we cant rely on it (as in my lawn spray example), and in effect we have to do almost as much as the Chinese. The words 'memory' and 'memorization' crop up regularly in discussions of learning literacy and spelling. 'Logic' hardly ever occurs. We should not have to learn the dictionary to be good writers and spellers.
We should not have to learn the dictionary to be good writers...
Why ever not? One has to learn *something*, and English spelling has *already* been reformed by the cleverest experts of all, the people who use it. Both Johnson and Webster recommended lots of changes that people rejected, although some were adopted with enthusiasm, because people thought they were a good idea. It's not as though a bunch of idiots were sitting around spelling things in crazy ways until a genius came along and told them that they were doing it all wrong and, suddenly, all the idiots say, "Thank you, O glorious Guru. Our eyes are opened!"
We *chose* to spell "through" the way it is because, in part, we spell "threw" the way it is. The little extra effort in memorisation pays great dividends in recognisability and clarity. Even when we "shorten" the word, we preserve a visible difference, contrasting "threw" with "thru." We English speakers are clever little monkeys, all in all, quite possibly more clever collectively that the would-be reformers give us credit for.
The Chinese are the same way, and have *lots* of homophones, but will often sketch the character in the air to clarify common points of confusion, or to respond to a puzzled look. Because Chinese characters reside in physical memory as well as visual memory, something our alphabet doesn't provide, the Chinese can follow a character sketched by another with the same facility with which a fencer might decipher a rapid pas d'armes.
When *we* do this, we don't have this same physical memory hoard to draw on, so we say aloud, "That's 'pin' with a 'I'" or whatever. (This last makes little sense for those who distinguish "pin" from "pen", but many people don't)
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
It's 'than' and 'then'
which seem to cause difficulties to some 'Mericans, which may arise from regional accents.
Angharad
Angharad
Then and than...
It's all regional. Many have no trouble, just as many have no trouble with blurring pen and pin, or palm and pom for that matter, no disrespect implied.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Characters vs. alphabet
Characters vs. alphabet.
On characters vs. alphabets, the issue, I believe, has already been decided. The alphabet is better. Virtually all major societies that have had a choice have abandoned their character (and sylabic) writing systems for an alphabet. Conversely, I'm not aware of any former alphabet-using culture that has converted to characters. The reason is clear, alphabets are simply far easier to learn.
The Chinese are a special case because of the different dialects, really mutually unintelligible languages. In mainland China, Mandarin is the official dialect, but hundreds of millions use Cantonese, Fujian, Shanghai or other dialects as their native tongue. The common Chinese writing system ties them together, thanks in large part to the first emperor of China, who burned all non-conforming books, including varying writing systems -- and buried alive those scholars who insisted upon teaching the old subject matter -- but, as the Chinese recognize, their system is a very mixed blessing, and here's a little secret that I, myself, have seen demonstrated: Chinese sometimes forget how to write their own characters.
As you are no doubt aware, the communists made efforts to convert to pinyin, a romanized alphabet system. It didn't fly because of the logistics: the native Mandarin speakers would have done just fine, but a population the size of the EU would have had to essentially learn to use a phonics system of another language. The commies did, however, simplify the written language a couple of times, which, as an unfortunate side-effect, has made anything written in Chinese older than sixty or seventy years impossible to read for the latest generation of mainland Chinese.
Phonics vs. rote memorization.
In the US, one of the great tragedies of the last thirty years has been the widespread abandonment of basic math for new math, and phonics for rote memorization. The first is another topic, but, as any professor over a certain age can tell you, both have contributed to declining math and reading/writing skills. Phonics is a major advantage of the alphabet and only sheer obstinacy among those who have invested in rote memorization keeps this proven method out of the mainstream.
English as a language.
English, as almost everyone knows, is a bastard language with problems that can be best appreciated by an English speaker if he learns another, more phonetic language, like German or Vietnamese. Personally, I don't consider the difference between "through" and "threw" to a be a source of wonder and beauty; I think it's a pain in the behind. English grammar is somewhat inconsistent, but better, middle of the road, not absurdly, in my opinion, complex like Polish or classical Greek, and more complex than Vietnamese, which is absurdly easy, but sometimes difficult to easily express complex nuance.
As a native English speaker, I wouldn't be averse to an upgrade. The spelling part of it wouldn't be THAT hard to do, a simple matter of legitimizing an alternative (if necessary), phonetic spelling to every word in the English language based on an established principle. For instance, "through" and "threw" might become "throo." This would have numerous obvious advantages, of course, but perhaps the greatest might have been demonstrated in a TV interview I fondly recall. In that interview, a beautiful French actress said, with a marvelously Gallic flair -- and a straight face: "Americans do not learn other languages. This forces others to learn English. I think this is very clever."
Personally, I think Americans, as this perceptive French woman stated, should continue to be clever. Despite all temptations, we should continue to resist learning other languages, forcing others to learn ours. Think of the progress we Americans have already made. English is the de facto international language of business. Although some in the UK might be naturally too shy to admit it, their English-speaking hearts secretly rejoice in the extension of Anglic hegemony. The French are, sadly, more reticent to praise this trend, but, as has been shown above, they truly respect us for our mighty non-efforts.
The UN's impressive capacity for international consensus should be brought to bear. Through (throo) their boundless determination, and with our American adaptability and know-how (nohow), we might yet make English the world language, and a world language is surely a slice of everyone's Utopian vision.
:)
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Abandonment....
>> In the US, one of the great tragedies of the last thirty years has been the widespread abandonment of basic math for new math, and phonics for rote memorization.
In the USA, a long series of "reforms" have been pushed by various right-wing groups, "Three R's Education," No Child Left Behind (with a 3-R's testing scheme), and others, all cleverly designed to prevent, as much as possible, children from ever learning to think for themselves, and to learn through rote recitation the habit of obeying authorities without thought.
Phonics, although ostensibly a skill worth having, requires children to examine facts and reason for themselves, albeit in tiny details. Still, the habit of reasoning ought properly to be stamped out whenever possible, since it may well lead to thoughtcrime.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Say what?
> In the USA, a long series of "reforms" have been pushed by various right-wing groups, "Three R's Education," No Child Left Behind (with a 3-R's testing scheme), and others, all cleverly designed to prevent, as much as possible, children from ever learning to think for themselves, and to learn through rote recitation the habit of obeying authorities without thought.
I think y'all have this backwards. Home schooling in the U.S. is mainly a reaction to the excesses of a left-dominated public school system, and most home schooling programs stress phonics in learning to read. Moreover, from what I'd seen with my children - and now with my grandchildren - in U.S. public schools (of two different states) it's not the "right wingers" who are stifling critical reasoning. We might as well have home-schooled our own children, we'd had to spend so much time overcoming the ~indoctrination~ they were receiving from their "liberal"1 teachers, and then teach them analytical thinking.
The best thing we'd done was pull our youngest from the public system and put him in a charter school, run by people I suppose you'd characterize as "right wing". He went from poorly motivated and just barely passing, to actually taking an interest in his education, and he graduated in the upper half of his class - at a school that has an excellent reputation for its graduates doing well in college.
1 - I use the word advisedly; Jefferson and Madison were true liberals - Ted Kennedy and Charles Schumer are not.
Jefferson and Madison were true liberals...
I beg your pardon? Both were vicious slaveholders, the ultimate and most oppressive form of capitalism, whatever their imagined virtues. They may have been amongst the "best" of a very bad lot, but their primary claim to fame as "liberals" is that they were "Godless" freethinkers and/or atheists. So was Socrates, a proto-fascist.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Yeah, they were
"Vicious?" "Whatever their imagined virtues?"
I think those are strange terms to use for those two well-known gentlemen who had such a great positive influence for freedom in this world.
It isn't reasonable to apply modern-day morality and simplistic standards to those who grew up in times when neither was relevant. It's better to judge them from where they started, what they did, and where they ended. It can be done: fair biographies of the two men have been written.
Yes, in the context of their age, they were definitely liberals in the classic sense.
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
Sometimes ....
Sometimes it's hard to know when you're being sarcastic.
No Child Left Behind was a program pushed by Bush but supported and weakened by Kennedy and passed as a bipartisan measure. Its goal was to make sure that "no child was left behind," that is to say, no one was simply passed on through school without learning something, which was happening all too often. The teachers hated NCLB because it tested the kids and through them, the effectiveness of their school. Worse (for the teachers), if a school was bad enough for an extended period, the parents would be permitted to send their kids to a better school. How this measure, designed to better the educational of our kids can be construed as to "... prevent, as much as possible, children from ever learning to think for themselves, and to learn through rote recitation the habit of obeying authorities without thought," is beyond me. Neither the subject matter, nor the curriculum was regulated. The only requirement was that students should demonstrate that they had learned a basic level of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Don't know how anyone can disagree with that.
No Child Left Behind never quite worked properly for a few reasons:
Many in congress, those who were supported by the Teachers' Union in particular, never wanted it to work, and so deliberately failed to fund it properly.
Teachers and borderline schools often taught to pass the test rather than to teach the subject matter better, the original goal of the program. I can sympathize in some ways, but letting kids go through high school without being taught, leaving them unprepared for life, was cruel and had to be stopped.
Students fail, not only because of bad teachers and principals, but for other reasons as well: poor home environments caused by stressed out single-parent families, and cultural factors, for instance, subjects too hot to address.
---
"Phonics, although ostensibly a skill worth having ..."
Phonics is not a skill, per se, it's a time-proven method used to teach reading and writing.
I agree with the rest of it, though.
"Still, the habit of reasoning ought properly to be stamped out whenever possible, since it may well lead to thoughtcrime."
Many were the times when I, as a young lad in school, threatened to think for myself. I survived the experience somehow, but how much easier it might have been to have a genuine social worker on hand to guide me whenever I listed away from the chosen path, a young man or woman with a smiling face, a box of Ritalin, and those wonderful words, "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
I'm often wry, but rarely sarcastic...
Just as any Dane, or any Jew for that matter, my humour is usually subtle.
>> The only requirement was that students should demonstrate that they had learned a basic level of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Don't know how anyone can disagree with that.
I can. The problem with the public schools is not teaching, or curriculum, but money, and NCLB did nothing about money (even refusing to fund the very testing it mandates) *except* to take it away from school systems which already had little. The end result was and is to cripple schools serving the inner cities and some rural or semi-rural areas, transfer a lot of public wealth into private pockets through "charter schools" that often performed no better, and often worse, since they boosted immediate profits by paying teachers less.
Since I presume, without much evidence, that the US legislative bodies are made up of rational and reasonably intelligent people (mainly men, which somewhat argues against this assumption [not sarcastic at all, simply a statement of fact]), and the outcome is foreseeable, I'm guessing that the people who put this law together knew what it would do, exacerbate the widening disparity between the rich and the poor, and shrink the middle classes.
And it's been working just fine.
This leaves inner city school children (for which read mostly "non-white" and/or "lower-class") enormously disadvantaged in the progress of their education and leads to high drop-out rates. Chris Rock has a telling skit in which he describes his neighbourhood, where the houses cost millions of dollars. There are four Black people in the neighbourhood, himself, Mary J. Blige, and two other entertainers, all world-class celebrities with extraordianry popular success and income. As he puts it, "Black folks have to grow *wings* to move into my neighbourhood, but the white guy next door is a dentist."
The "standardised" testing mandated by NCLB does *nothing* to ensure that students have the power to think, but the draconian punishments meted out to school systems which fail to "pass" sufficient numbers ensures that teaching to the test and covert fixes are the only rational survival strategy.
And in the meantime, lower-class children fall further behind.
Feh! (Not at all sarcastic)
Utah, not exactly a hotbed of liberalism, was the first state to abandon NCLB, *and* Federal money, because the testing and bookkeeping costs of keeping that money exceeded the Federal subsidies in play. Other states are following suit.
NCLB, in *actuality*, is a back-door means of ending Federal support of children's education.
Way to go, Washington mavens. (That, I must confess, was sarcastic)
Cheers, (that was wry, not sarcastic)
Puddin'
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"The consequences, especially for minority students, are more and more tragic, and you see it in the data," says Sylvia Bruni, assistant superintendent of the Laredo, Texas, Independent School District. "We have enormous dropout rates, in my community as many 30 percent of all students.... Statewide there's a marked decline in the number of students who are prepared for higher education."
Texas, too, is not widely known as a breeding ground of the vast "liberal conspiracy," although they are, being social conservatives, more inclined to punish "sinners" than reward them, "Sin" having been defined in Calvinist terms, since Calvin knew better than Jesus what Jesus actually *meant* to say.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Oooookay!
"Just as any Dane, or any Jew for that matter, my humour is usually subtle."
Aardvark cowers from the unfathomable but blinding Danish/Jewish Light of Subtlety. :)
"The problem with the public schools is not teaching, or curriculum, but money."
The above is too subtle for me. The US spends more per capita on education than anyone else in the world. The Washington, DC public school system is the most expensive in the United States (and probably in the world), yet produces notoriously poor results.
"NCLB, in *actuality*, is a back-door means of ending Federal support of children's education."
That would be a first, since all government programs seem to grow rather than to shrink, and I doubt that the feds would want to give up control of any part of their "hard-won" educational fiefdom. No, NCLB was deliberately watered down and underfunded so that it would fail, terms like "personal accountability" and "Bush success" being anathema to those who did the deed.
In a way, I wish that your statement were true, that it was all a nefarious plot -- with a proviso: In my more perfect world, no federal funding would be taken from the taxpayers to be given back with strings attached. Under the Constitution, the feds have no business telling the states how to run their educational systems.
Regardless, the federal government provides only a small amount of money for school systems around the country (the exception being the aforementioned Washington, DC, which is under federal control, and, I think, schools for US military children). The control of public schools, the school board members, the curriculum, the schools themselves, and the funds raised to support it all, is overwhelmingly local.
"The "standardised" testing mandated by NCLB does *nothing* to ensure that students have the power to think ..."
Interesting. I know of no law that would *force* children to think -- perhaps you could come up with one -- but I've always thought that improving the quality of schools as a step in the right direction.
"... but the draconian punishments meted out to school systems which fail to "pass" sufficient numbers ensures that teaching to the test and covert fixes are the only rational survival strategy."
"Draconian?" "Pass," in scare quotes? "Covert?" Turn to the left and *cough*!
How about just looking around at successful school districts in the country, of which there are thousands, and applying similar standards and methods? I'm not being naive: I'm well aware that there are cultural factors out of the control of some of the schools, and yet, undeniably, there are bad principals, rotten teachers, and demonstrably poor training methods that could and should be replaced and upgraded, as the case may be.
This talk of "draconian" punishments to school districts, as if school districts were living beings, and "numbers," as if the children represented by them were not, well, that's too subtle a construct for this aardvark. In my simplistic world, the children are the ones with the right, the right to a decent education. They are the reason that schools exist, and the teachers and administrators are, at the core, employees in the system designed to provide a decent education to them.
Your concern about hurting school systems is all gossamer wings on butterflies to this puzzled termite eater. In my universe, improving education is helping a school system, not hurting it, and testing, while inconvenient, is the only way to determine educational quality. I understand that some teachers and administrators feel threatened by measuring their effectiveness. Too bad. The children don't exist to serve them, it's the other way around.
Unfortunately, children can't vote for better education, but teachers can vote to protect their jobs. Children have no money to bribe legislators to make laws favorable to them, but teachers, through their union, have and do.
That being said, the majority of teachers are pretty good and want the best for their kids. Too many administrators and socially generated methods that don't work are a different story, but all of the above combined don't add up to what is really wrong. The elephants in the room, in my opinion, are the real problem. In the 1940's, Harlem had a pretty darn good school system that rivaled the best white schools of NYC. Facing the fact that poor education is too often a social issue is too hot to handle for most with certain agendas and theories, and must, therefore, be avoided at all costs, which sometimes includes maintaining a fictional world.
Then again, I could be too unsubtle to see the "big picture."
Wryly yours,
Aardvark
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
English simplification
As an engineer, I would love to see English simplified. As a writer, I would hate to see the richness of the language reduced.
Subtle changes in word usage and word order can express a myriad array of meanings and feelings. This enhances the artistry of writing, and allows us authors to create works that touch one's heart.
So, while Shaw's alphabet and others like Unifon have their advantages, I would hate to be limited to them.
If you seriously want to try a logical created (as opposed to evolved) language, try Esperanto. (I suspect that it would have caught on better if it had been based on English instead of Latin/Spanish/Portuguese.)
By the way, I have noticed that English is one of the more efficient languages when it comes to expressing thoughts with few words. If you look at any of the multilingual instruction sheets that come with the various appliances that we buy, you'll note that the only only the glyph-based languages take up less space on the paper.
Ray Drouillard
Volapuk
Other artificial languages have been based on English, you can hear one of them in the movie Fifth Element. None of them caught on even as well as Esperanto, in part because all of them are harder to learn. :) But they do have orthographic spelling.
English grammar and syntax lend themselves to terseness; we have fewer word endings to change, making word order do that work. This is the heritage of English's mixed origin as a lingua franca between Anglo-Saxon and Norman French which is also part of the spelling problem.
Some Asian languages are even more terse due to the compression made possible by using phonemic tonality. Vietnamese is especially terse since it is tonal and also has a mixed origin as a trade tongue between several forms of Chinese and an ancestral language related to Cambodian.
The Vietnamese use a modified Roman script which they switched to from Chinese ideograms several centuries ago. Spelling is reasonably orthographic despite linguistic drift; some of the spelled sounds are no longer distinct. Also, major dialects are spelled the same even though pronunciation is different but the mapping stays pretty consistent. Some spellings exist just because of dialect differences: Bacviet doesn't have the "r" sound and words spelled with an "r" are pronounced with a "z" which is spelled various other ways, too. Namviet has no broken-rising tone, words spelled with it are pronounced in the South with a falling-rising tone. Trungviet doesn't have a "v" sound, using a "w" instead, etc.
Old Vietnamese texts written in ideograms are subjects only for scholars these days, though someone with knowledge of both modern Vietnamese and Chinese ideograms can puzzle through some of it.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
If you want logic...
Try Lojban:
http://www.lojban.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
It goes back to the Fifties, as Loglan, and is surprisingly workable.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
expressing thoughts with concision
Translation in Esperanto:
You can notice that Esperanto takes less space, even if some words are longer than in English. In fact, the idea could have been expressed even shorter, I just made a literal translation.
This is true for any text, not just for this one.
For instance compare http://lingvo.org/en.php to http://lingvo.org/eo.php
ЄРRemuŠ(Belgio)- perSkajpe: RemushBE
Memorize the dictionary?
As a Kiwi, i am one whose pronunciation of 'pin' and 'pen' sometimes confuses listeners!
However, i dont make signals in the air, nor do i do so when saying 'there', 'their' or 'they're', or 'sound', or other homofones.
Memorizing the dictionary? I refuse to! I've got more to do with my time. I would rather that the basic rules or norms of spelling were observed in as near their entirety as possible, that i know them, and that by using them i will be able to encode (write) and decode (read) any word i strike. I failed to do this in the garden shop because the spelling was not reliable.
Italians dont have to learn the dictionary. They learn the letters and their sounds in the first year or so at school, and then apply that learning to their ongoing reading and writing. Gwen Thorstad's 1991 comparative study of British and Italian children (The effect of orthography on the acquisition of literacy skills, British Journal of Psychology 82) noted examples of a six-year-old Italian spelling 'termometro', 'leteralmente', 'percettibile' and other such words correctly in dictation. Another Italian of the same age with a specific learning difficulty made many mistakes, but a year later he showed 'considerable improvement, much greater than an English child with that degree of disability'.
In comparative words testing, the misreading and mispelling percentages were:
English 'literally', 45% reading, 99% spelling; Italian 'literalmente', 7% reading, 17% spelling;
'perceptible', 61% reading, 99% spelling; 'percettibile', 17% reading; 19% spelling;
'thermometer', 28% reading, 83% spelling; 'termometro', 17% reading, 6% spelling.
I repeat: spelling is a tool for gaining literacy. It should be upgraded, updated, and honed, just as is any other tool used in acquiring a skill.
Perhaps we should modify spelling ...
... to match pronunciation once we've decided just whose accent we're going to use as the standard. If we used our Royal family's pronunciation 'house' would be spelled as 'hice' - you OK with that? My accent will be different from yours and probably different from most of the contributors to this thread. Phonetic spelling would mean that I spelt words to suit me and others might find it difficult to read
In your examples I really don't see why any of the English spellings are any more difficult than the Italian.
When we cycle toured in New Zealand last century (just) we noticed the close similarity the accent gives to 'i' and 'e' but it didn't make understanding particularly difficult.
btw this thread echoes controversies on BBC radio 4 which always take off and have a life of their own once the subject of grammar or spelling crop up.
Geoff
Spelling and Pronunciation
Different dialects of Spanish pronounce things somewhat differently. This is usually shown up in how native speakers of different areas spell or misspell words containing s, c, z as one group, g, h, j, x as another group and b, v as a third group. Vowels don't differ that much from one dialect to another or differ systematically so the mapping to spelling still agrees, i and y being the most often confused.
Other dialects of Spain, like Catalan and Galician are not exactly Spanish and Basque isn't even in the same language family as any other language in Europe.
But Spanish, like Italian, and many other languages has a nearly one-to-one mapping of pronunciation and spelling in major dialects: if you can spell it, you can pronounce it 99.5%+ of the time and if you can pronounce it, you can spell it 99%+ of the time, regardless of whether you are from Leon or Ciudad Mexico or Montevideo. The maps work, in the main.
French maps from spelling to pronouncing nearly perfectly in major dialects but is almost as bad as English going the other way.
Why the English spellings of different words are harder than the Italian spellings is partly because English is phonemically more complex -- English has between eleven and fourteen phonemic vowels, compared to five to seven in most Euro languages and half a dozen to a dozen more meaningful consonant sounds than most. No getting away from that.
Our maps are going to be more complex to begin with because we're using an alphabet designed for Latin. Now add that our maps have quirky imperfections and exceptions and English gets really difficult to spell. I can teach almost anyone to spell nearly any Spanish words correctly on first hearing them in perhaps a few days with the exceptions noted above regarding c,s,z etc.
English has HUNDREDS of confusing groupings that are individually more complex and collectively more daunting than any other language on Earth that uses an alphabet.
The problem in English is that the London dialect was not perfectly dominant when English spelling was formed. Northern, western and southeastern dialects also stuck their oars in. And no one took the autocratic position that all spelling would be based on upper class London the way Spanish was based on noble Madrid or Italian on clerical Roma.
England was more egalitarian than that plus French still had enough cachet that some spellings were based on how the word was pronounced in the antique Norman French that still influenced English. With that precedent, some other spellings harked back to Latin or Greek or Hebrew pronunciations or imagined pronunciations or differences introduced just to indicate word origins. At the time English spelling was formed and solidified, the language was in flux, changing from something Chaucer would recognize to something Shaxpeere would. Pardon, Shakespeare. :) London filled and refilled with speakers from all over the Isles. And every one of them had an idea of how to pronounce and spell "eggs" or "cnicht".
So we're saddled with a system that makes no sense in very large ways. Not a lot can be done about it because too many people resist any large change and the English speaking people simply WILL not bend to arbitrary decrees about their language. They never have and they likely never will on this planet. Small changes do happen, usually from the ground up.
If you want to see what extreme English spelling reform might look like, examine the written version of Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Cnicht...
Knight, of course.
Puddin'
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
A ....
.... braw bricht moonlicht one I suppose?
Scots English went the other way...
A brave bright moonlight night...
But I presume you know that. I say this only for the benefit of those who didn't have the time to study the evolution of English with such care as yours, probably having been busy working for a living. Cnicht was the old spelling and pronunciation of what we now think of as a "Knight."
If one knows how the sounds were remapped, one can usually puzzle out how they would sound, and what they would look like, in the Scots language.
This transparent correspondence is just one of the things that would be lost in almost any spelling reform, and the advisability of retaining the relationship was the reason behind the innovative prior spelling reform that created "Knight" in the first place.
Spelling reforms have their own momentum, and don't usually need all that much help. People do them on their own all the time, in the interest of rapidity (thru) or peer group identfication (kewl) or just poor spelling. Eventually, some of these innovations "stick," and then we're stuck with them.
Sorry about the previous "in joke" (without explanation) that started this.
Cheers,
Puddleby-by-the-Marsh
---------------------------
If one place is as good as any other,
it's high time we decided. Otherwise
when we get there, we won't know
we've arrived.
--- Dr Dolittle (Hugh Lofting)
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Tautology?
I seem to recall that the good Doctor lived in the neighbouring village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh.
Puddleby-by-the-Marsh itself has since the mid sixties suffered a severe economic decline following malicious accusations of tautology in the Times Educational Supplement. It's subsequent adoption of the shorter version of its name, i.e. 'Puddle-by-the-Marsh', in order to avoid an almost universal derision, was, as with most precipitate actions, a mistake. The shortened name with its accompanying suggestion of an inconsequential but fever ridden swamp, did little to enhance it's image as an idyllic country retreat and it was thus largely shunned by the London stockbrokers and bankers seeking to purchase rural property in order to enhance their dinner party conversational options. Financial meltdown swiftly followed.
It appears in the Domesday Book as Puddleby-en-le-Marsh and if it had not slavishly bowed to reformers insisting on a simplified version, but maintained this original title, it would doubtless now be a thriving community instead of a decayed hamlet.
Which must prove something .... or other. It does, if nothing else, add even more point to the good doctor's words which you so timely quote. Would he were living at this hour!
P.S. This really is a P.S. insomuch as it is a result of my having looked up Dr. Dolittle after my comment was originally posted. I find that the good Doctor himself is now considered a racist and his books have now all been bowdlerised to remove much that gave offence. How very sad as I had such childhood memories of him as such a dear kind man. As did the whole of Puddleby-on-the Marsh. I think the safest thing is probably to give up reading altogether or at least never to admit to it! It however does rather neatly refer back to the parallel theme contained in these comments.
Puddleby... Puddleby-on-the-Marsh
The "-by" in Puddleby ought properly to be the Danish for "town," so there'd be no particular self-reference, but rather a localisation which would place it somewhere within the old Danelaw. Oddly enough, however, Puddleby is currently reported to be located in the West Country, so perhaps it's so *near* the marsh that it *slipped* down south by increments, possibly propelled by seasonal flooding. It's been a long time since I'd last read the stories, fifty-odd years, and you're absolutely right on.
That will teach me not to use a name without first looking it up in my handy Gazetteer of imaginative places.
Cheers,
Puddin'
-----------------
After I have gone, remember never to let the flies settle on your food before you eat it; and do not sleep on the ground when the rains are coming.
--- John Dolittle, MD
Luckily, the stories are out of copyright now, and three of them are available on the web:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/501/501-h/501-h.htm
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
The good doctor
Sorry to hear that my friend the good doctor Doolittle was a racist. His was the only series of which i red all the books. Probably set me on the rong path.
And what about Epaminondas? Who 'aint got the brains u was born with'. This must hav reinforced racism in my skull!
Another i enjoyed was Richmal Comptons William series, a boys book that must hav entrenched sexism in me befor feminism was discovered!
Sorry to hear that my friend the good doctor Doolittle...
...was a racist.
I'm not at all sure he was, any more than Little Black Sambo, which was about dark (Tamil?) Indians from Madras in India, not Africans of any colour, had anything to do with "pickaninnies" or other US racial stereotypes. There was a lot of *British* racial stereotyping in it, and colonial ideas of the "white man's burden," but in general the book is far more paternalistic (maternalistic? since the author was a woman?) than contemptuous.
What happens, though, is that language which was acceptable in a certain place and time, which may have been covertly "racist" as part of a then popular worldview, may eventually become anathema, given the passage of a few years.
Because "Sambo" was "black," American racists picked up on the name and it became an *extremely* contemptuous reference to Americans of African ancestry, American editions of the book changed the illustrations to reflect the original racist mistake, and the story itself went to hell in a handbasket.
It's no longer published, nor is it widely available. Once poisoned by association, it's difficult to overcome the racist taint in people's memories.
Language is composed of meanings, all the scattered bits of memory that get attached to the sound and look of words, and just as it's no longer possible to say "Arbeit Macht Frei" in German without calling to mind the Nazi death camps, it's extremely difficult to disassociate oneself so completely from the remembered past as to let one freely use the word "nigger," or "Sambo," in conversation without wincing, and one's listeners may do the same.
Have you ever heard the Niagra Falls vaudeville joke made famous by Abbot and Costello? The names of the places changed to suit the audience. Sometimes it was the Pokomoko River, or whatever sounded "funny."
Here's a version by the Three Stooges (not nearly as good) but it shows the importance of memory and words:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ9lQe2YoBs
After just a few repetitions, the audience is sensitised to the word to such an extent that they start to laugh when they hear the word, long before any slapstick occurs. And the "bums" in the piece are turned into madmen through their own sensitisation.
In the original, Abbot is "cured" of his mania, and eventually says the word to prove it, whereupon the former patsy says, "Niaagra Falls! Slowly I turned..."
Language doesn't sit still, and what may be perfectly "normal" speech and dialogue in one context may become perfectly dreadful in another, just like Niagra Falls.
Cheers,
Puddin'
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P.S. When I was young, the old woman next door to us took a shine to me and gave me her collection of Nancy Drew books from the Thirties, written by Mildred Wirt. Nancy wasn't new to me, for they'd all been republished, starting all over again with the same titles, but I was both shocked and intrgued by the graphic, and sometimes rude, language that Mildred used, casually describing the "sallow faces" of the villains, and the quaint antics of "coloured" people, if they appeared at all. All the stories had been bowdlerised by the time I'd seen them, their original raw immediacy toned down so as not to offend *anyone*.
That's the risk one takes with "authentic" dialogue of any sort, that it will be tampered with eventually, or withdrawn from circulation entirely, depending upon the vagaries of public taste, happenstance, and memory.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Whose pronunciation?
Geoff: I dont know about u, but i can confidently attack spelling almost any Italian word (i cant speak or write the language). I will be wrong sometimes, but i bet not as often as an Italian (not knowing English) would be trying to spell English words.
In another study (2000: Nature Neuroscience, vol 3, #1: A cultural effect on brain damage; E Paulesu et al), this quote was made: ‘Italian students were faster at both word and nonword reading, even when the nonwords were derived from English words.’
'Whose dialect?' u ask. Our present spelling more or less (mainly less!) indicates 'standard English', There are now two 'standard Englishes': Received pronunciation (RP, British) and general American. We speakers of other varieties cope as well as anyone with the spellings. (Thats not saying much!)
New spellings could be based on these two, as expressed by BBC and NBC newsreaders. There'd hav to be a bit of giv and take, but it would not be impossible, and we outlanders would still cope, and cope much better! As would Brits and Americans. Its regularity in spelling that we need, mor than fonemicity.
Writing Style and Contractions
If you haven't been following wolfjess' Death Dealer Saga [ http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/52391/death-dealers-saga ] you might want to check it out for reference.
One of the inspirations in her series is the old Robotech series [ the battle mechs specifically ]. In that series the author(s) created an entire society that did NOT use any contractions, they considered them a mark of inferiority and a hindrance to clarity in speech. ( as stated by clan member to a captured warrior that had been adopted into a clan in one of the novels ) ( Cobra by Timothy Zahn has characters much like WolfJess's 2nd gen death dealers, cyborg warriors that were built for behind enemy lines action in forming rebellion ect. )
I do run across stories I cannot finish reading for one of two reasons, sometimes the subject matter just drives me away, other times that story is to difficult to follow because the dialogue just doesn't make sense. Often I'm not sure if the latter is intended dialogue or typographical errors. Bailey's stories the characters have a pattern to their dialogue, even their internal dialogues, that in my experience screams Maritimer. I can follow it fairly easily, but this pattern being used for characters not from the Maritimes [ Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and NewFoundland/Labrador ] doesn't fit correctly from my own knowledge of people who are from the settings. Is this an intended dialogue pattern or is it Bailey's own speech pattern? [ NewFoundland = to home, Nova Scotia / New Brunswick (PEI?) home, the rest of Canada Back home / At home, Bailey uses the NS/NB format ]
We all have our own patterns we use without noticing this can compound issues with readers following the dialogue when you add unclear speech patterns of teens to it. The best thing anyone can do is to have someone else proofread a story before publication so they can communicate with the author about clarity issues with dialogue, or find typos that would be missed by the author.
Stupidity is a capital offense. A summary not indictable.
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