Re: Victor Appleton - a blatent racist or product of his time?

- hi; in article, <aqc7335cab38p5fnv8v4f3n38vns3b6bil@xxxxxxx>,
philospher77@xxxxxxxxx made shift to excuse:
[shuffle]
(Sorry about the late response... I'm moving again.)

- no apology needed, and so none accepted; this isn't irc,
and a considered reply is much more rewarding than is an
instant, and possibly ill-thought out argument in response.

- hope the move goes, or has gone, fine; i shudder to con-
template the work of packing, loading, unloading & sorting
out however-many three-ton truck-loads it'd take me, to
move again.
(i haven't finished unpacking from the *last* time i moved -
twenty-one years ago, now...)

and elaborated:
("ppint. at IMT") wrote:
philospher77@xxxxxxxxx demanded:
Thomas Lindgren wrote:
John F. Eldredge wrote:
Gene Ward Smith wrote:
[]
And, of course, if you are speaking of books rather than movies,
an excessive use of phonetic spelling, particularly in a dialect
the reader isn't familiar with, makes for rather slow reading.

I find the use of phonetic spelling both a bit dated and all too
annoying, and so tend to leave those exercises on the shelf. Like-
wise for other sprees of orthographical eccentricity(*).

[]
Do you object if someone from France, say, is shown using "oui" and
"non"? I always just assume that someone who is written as speaking
in dialect speaks in dialect. I like to "hear" my characters when I
read, and find it extremely annoying if someone in Scotland, say, is
speaking perfect King's English (unless there is some good in-book
reason, like he went to court in England and had it beaten into him
until it was a habit.)

- where there is established spelling to go with the words'
alternate pronunciation, fine; but where there is not, the
extended use of (attempts at) phonetic spelling wear poorly
as a rule, rapidly becoming tiresome. (there may be occasion-
al exceptions to this.)

And you see, this is where you and I differ. To me, words represent
sounds. So almost by default, all words are spelled phonetically,
with only a very small number being sight-read.

- um. this may be true in some languages - it is certainly
claimed of some (not least welsh) - but it is decidedly un-
true of english. partly because of the language's happily
mongrel origins, and partly because its spelling got frozen
by the invention & exploitation of the printing-press at a
time before several important changes in pronunciation (and
other aspects of the tongue), letters & letter combinations
are not only multi-valued in english, but their actual val-
ue in any word cannot necessarily be deduced from their imm-
ediate context, nor from preceding or following syllables'.

- "ghoti" ! - *g*

- most fluent readers of english read most of the words on
the page by pattern recognition - unless a majority of the
words on the page are without their familiar reading vocab-
ulary. (and even then, they're liable to read those unfam-
iliar words by pattern recognition of the parts, unless the
words' roots themselves are unfamiliar to their eyes.)

- and you were a sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth cent-
ury north londoner or midlandswoman, modern english spelling
would _still_ not truly read phonetically to you, for all
the roots of the king's english/the queen's english/bbc
english/rp english are largely thence derived - too much has
changed, accreted, been stolen from sundry sources, all of
whose spellings have been incompletely - and inconsistently -
anglicised, according to the pronunciations prevailing at the
time the current state of anglicisation was achieved, & since.

So, to me, there is no way to spell "Come here chile so's I kin tell
ya all 'bout ol' Ben and the time he caught hisself a big'un down on
the river" except like that. "Come here child so I can tell you all
about old Ben and the time he caught himself a big one down on the
river" _sounds_ different to me.

- and to me;

And it will sound _wrong_ if the person saying that in the story is
not of a class and culture where that is the normal diction.

- ah; but the latter, the orthodox spelling, has no accent to
me: in the absence of other indicators, i hear it as neutral;
but an author may describe the tone, the pitch, the breadth or
the narrowness of the vowels, the musicality (lilt?) or the
harshness of the voice, and so forth: and i will remember this
for the particular character, so long as the occasional hint
of a reminder is given.
and its use would be wrong in the context you give, not be-
cause the accent is wrong, but because the dialect - the words
used - are. that someone habitually drops their "d"s (or "h"s)
transforms the words spoken - "and where there is established
spelling to go with the words' alternate pronunciation, fine";
so long as i am used to it, or become so, it does not obtrude.

- but where i am unfamiliar with most or _all_ of the patterns
of the vocabulary an author choses to use - or sometimes, even,
merely a large part of it - this can very easily make reading
a laboured task, a thing to be done only at need, rather than
a delight and a joy, and one gladly undertaken.

The one dialect writing quirk that I find entirely irksome is used in
Hambly's Benjamin January books. Ben is a colored surgeon living in
New Orleans shortly after the Americans bought it. As a well-educated
man of his times, he speaks French, English, Latin, and Greek. And I
can accept the occasional Latin and Greek phrase being dropped in the
book, especially when he is talking to other educated people. But she
uses the Greek alphabet to spell out the Greek phrases, which turns it
into pretty decoration for me, since I'm not going to try and figure
out how that's supposed to sound. If she had gone with phonetic
spellings, I might have a clue what the sentence was.

- *g* - which is ironic, given that classical greek is/was
pretty well *entirely* phonetic, as opposed to modern [a]; a
happy state, but not one that rules out the existence of acc-
ent _or_ dialect.
some greek-speakers of classical times were accused of the
barbarous mangling of the beautiful tongue (iirc, principally
the macedonians and the epirotes; bicvwbw in this); non-greek
speakers were sometimes complimented upon their urbane and
highly polished manner, though i do not know whether this was
more a matter of political diplomacy, the exoticism of their
accent, the mellifluity of tone of their voice - or because
the persian nobles & their officials simply were trained to
courtesy, and the greek notables of that time largely not.

- i'm no longer a fluent reader of classical greek (which up
to a certain level i once was): and i doubt many people are,
these days. so it'd be sensible for authors to give english
translations by way of feetnotes, or possibly by alternating
the original and the translation page by page, for longer
texts, chapter headings & their theme-setting quotations, if
any; cf. the various editions of james blish's _Dr. Mirabilis_.

- but do merkins no longer learn their alpha-beta-gamma-deltas
at school? - in maths and physics, if nowhere else?

But it is also a good example of dialect used to effect. Ben uses
well-spoken French when dealing with the whites, and talks da Gombe
when trying to get information from lower-class colored and blacks.
Names are spelled the way that the people speaking them (French or
English) pronounce them, etc.

- um, i take it that it's the book you're adducing as example,
not the use of greek; again, i've no objection to authors
using the appropriate dialect's vocabulary, and rendering it
in the established & accepted form of the word - so long as
the meaning is pretty immediately discernible from context -
unless it is not, to the characters who can hear it spoken at
the time - and so long as there aren't _so_ many of these that
are in whole and in root part so totally unfamilar to my eyes,
that reading the book becomes a chore.

- love, ppint.
[the address from which this was posted bounces e-mail;
please change the "f" to a "g" and drop the "v" if you
wish to cc. or e-mail me.]

[a] - a case might be makeable, that modern greek is phonetic:
i don't and won't believe it, of a language where and and
all vowels may be pronounced as "i"s (a short "ee" if you
will), but may not - and "basileus" ("bazil-use" ?), king,
becomes "vissilevs". hmpf.
--
"The people all paint themselves red, and eat monkeys,
whereof there is an inexhaustible supply in the hills."
- Histories, Book Four - Herodotus
.

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