linguaphiles: Literary phoenetic transcription

Anonymous (

ulvesang) wrote in

linguaphiles,
@ 2005-11-27 14:02:00

Current mood:	hungry
Current music:	Aha - Take on Me
Entry tags:	english

Literary phoenetic transcription
In English, many authors will write in a highly-unstandard style of spelling to show people's accents or other nuances of speech, e.g.:

"He's go' tha Shinnin'!"
"You mean the Shining?"
"Tha Shinnin'! Ye don' wan' us ta get sooed!"

"Yo, wassup mah niggah?"

"Ve are Hanz und Franz, an' ve are here to pamp YOU UP!!!"

Do writers in any other languages do this??? How often? Where? How?

(Post a new comment)

	talinthas 2005-11-27 02:16 pm UTC (link)
	i dont know if anyone else does it, but i was just reading the novel of Trainspotting, and good god is that book hard to read. It's written in a phoneticised version of a scottish accent, and is just brutal on the eyes =) (Reply to this) (Thread)

	newsmith 2005-11-27 02:20 pm UTC (link)
	I love all of Welsh's stuff, and what hooked me was not only the content but his style of writing as such. Dickens is a famous guy writing like this too. And I don't know why I threw that in there. (Reply to this) (Parent)

tiggielil
2005-11-27 02:20 pm UTC (link)

I haven't seen it in Norwegian books, although it probably does occur. In the early 20th century, there were quite a lot of authors who wrote entire books and series of books in a written language closely modeled on their own dialect. The two Norwegian written languages also allow people to choose between a variety of spellings, ideally the one closest to the way they speak.

Also, SMS language - a lot of people completely deviate from common spelling to make their written language read more like their own dialect. Some examples of a standard text message:

English: I can't come tomorrow.
Standard bokmål: Jeg kan ikke komme i morgen.
Standard nynorsk: Eg kan ikkje kome i morgon. (Might be a bit wrong - not my first written language)
Middle Norwegian dialect: Æ kain itj komm i mårra.

Wow, that was probably pretty useless. Sorry.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

doctorfedora
2005-11-27 02:22 pm UTC (link)

What the hell: here's Japanese. Long story short, it's very easy to express dialect in a language that uses a wholly phonetic writing system for the vast majority of its text (and the non-phonetic stuff can have phonetic "how it's pronounced" stuff written by it to show how it would be said), so yes, it's VERY easy in Japan to write dialects, and not nearly as hard to read since it's already phonetically written.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

rgovrebo
2005-11-27 05:37 pm UTC (link)

It occurs quite often, in local newspapers and the like, at least in the west country, and possibly especially in bokmål-writing, but close-to-nynorsk-speaking areas.

It's done in Terry Pratchett's books. The Nac Mac Feegle speak a sort of Scottish gibberish language in the original, but speak something close to nynorsk in the Norwegian translation.

The original instance of 'nynorsk-speakers in bokmål work' was the Donald Duck story drawn by Carl Barks where they go to the Andes to find the chickens that lay square eggs. In the original, the Indians speak a deep-south US English, in the Norwegian version they speak nynorsk. Highly controversial when it first came out, probably because many of the _målfolk_ are uptight.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

kroki_refur
2005-11-27 02:28 pm UTC (link)

It happens in Finnish. In fact, it's more common for Finnish novelists to represent speech the way it sounds rather than according to spelling conventions. This must be largely due to the fact that the Finnish spelling system is much closer to the sound of the speech anyway, whereas English spelling is so different that any kind of "phonetic representation" is considered "hard on the eyes".

Another issue with this is that, because there's no agreed single way of representing any given sound in English, you wind up with a situation where speakers of South-East England dialects often represent the Northern English /u/ as oo, which makes no sense at all in the North of England (or at least not my bit of it) where the sound in book is very different from the sound in come, for example.

Hmm, I appear to have rambled somewhat. Don't mind me!

(Reply to this) (Thread)

stasha2g
2005-11-27 09:25 pm UTC (link)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

sparkofcreation
2005-11-27 02:33 pm UTC (link)

I just worked on the translation of a Puerto Rican novel in which the Spanish characters' accents were transcribed as having replaced every Z, S and soft C with "zzz." (Which in Spanish is pronounced like "th" in English.) I'm not sure if that counts, though, since it was done entirely to mock the characters—it wasn't supposed to be an accurate transcription of the accent, nor was it. (Castillian Spanish pronounces S as S and Z/soft C as "th.")

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	sparkofcreation 2005-11-27 02:34 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, and there's a Spanish play called Holiday Aut (by Itziar Pascual) because the author thought people would pronounce it wrong if it were spelled correctly. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	arosoff 2005-11-27 03:37 pm UTC (link)
	That reminds me, I read a Spanish short story once where the author used a phonetic transcription of the characters' accent (Puerto Ricans living in New York). I can't remember the author though; this was several years ago... (Reply to this) (Parent)

	hkitsune 2005-11-27 02:58 pm UTC (link)
	They definitely do it in French. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ernie_lundie 2005-11-27 03:01 pm UTC (link)
	What books? I would like to see this. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

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hkitsune, 2005-11-27 03:17 pm UTC

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laughing_dreams, 2005-11-27 03:48 pm UTC

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gregh1983, 2005-11-27 05:17 pm UTC

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purplegenie, 2005-11-27 05:54 pm UTC

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fleurdelista, 2005-11-28 03:10 pm UTC

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six_crazy_guys, 2005-11-28 06:51 pm UTC

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fleurdelista, 2005-11-28 06:53 pm UTC

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mistal_darkange, 2005-11-29 12:43 am UTC

(Screened Post)

	gogalucky 2005-11-27 05:57 pm UTC (link)
	nice song :) (Reply to this)

	naujagimis 2005-11-27 11:52 pm UTC (link)
	I obscenity in the milk of thy mother! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	thesparque 2005-11-27 09:13 pm UTC (link)
	You all right? (Reply to this) (Parent)

	conuly 2005-11-29 12:22 am UTC (link)
	Well, I have no lofty excuses for it. I'm just not nice. So, yeah, I try to keep it to myself. (Reply to this)

	Re: PCness anarchys_savior 2005-11-29 01:32 am UTC (link)
	I never stated in my original comment that the OP was racist. I did, however, come to that conclusion after s/he and many others defended the use of the word so ardently. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	Re: PCness embryomystic 2005-11-29 02:45 am UTC (link)
	I don't think you have nearly enough information to make a judgment call like that. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	Re: PCness sparkofcreation 2005-11-29 02:57 am UTC (link)
	To ulvesang: that was not directed at you. This post is fine. LJ had a blip when I tried to post, and posted the comment to the post instead of to the person I was replying to. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

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