Dialect representation, resented
A couple of days ago, I
commented
on the use of "unusual spelling intended to represent dialectal or
colloquial idiosyncrasies of speech" (from the OED's definition of "eye
dialect"), noting that this is likely to be understood as expressing
contempt. A case in point, from a letter in the NYT
Book Review, 5/8/05, from Butch
Trucks (of the Allman Brothers Band), about a
Rolling Stone story about the band
written by Grover Lewis:
In Lewis's article, all the dialogue
among members of our group seemed to be taken directly from
Faulkner. We are from the South. We did and still do have
Southern accents. We are not stupid. The people in the
article were creations of Grover Lewis. They did not exist in
reality.
(The letter went to the
Times
because a review, by Roy Blount Jr., of
Splendor in the Short Grass: The Grover
Lewis Reader, which reprints the
RS story about the band on tour,
had appeared in the
Book Review
on 4/3/05.)
The reference to Faulkner is surprising. If you go back and look
at your Faulkner, you'll see that he is sparing in his use of special
spellings of all types, including those representing ordinary casual
speech (
goin' for
going,
wanna for
want to) and those representing
dialect features (
ma for
my,
brotha for
brother). I suspect
that he
NEVER uses unusual spellings for perfectly
ordinary pronunciations (
enuff
for
enough and the
like). He does indicate non-standard and dialectal features of
morphology, syntax, and the lexicon, though, as in this dialogue from
the black maid Dilsey early on in
The
Sound and the Fury:
Aint you got no better sense than
that. What you want to listen to Roskus for, anyway.
That's quite enough to let us "hear" the characters in our head
and supply some version of the phonetics. For the classier white
characters, like the Compsons, we're pretty much on our own, though we
can be sure that their speech had regional features.
As for Grover Lewis, I'll have to get hold of the book to see just how
he represented the speech of the Allman Brothers and their
crew. What Trucks tells us in his letter isn't about
pronunciation specifically:
We had a road manager that was a
graduate of Georgia Tech and before coming with us had been a bank
auditor. He was an educated and sophisticated man. Mr. Lewis quotes him
as calling the desert as we flew over Arizona "a right smart of sand".
I worked with this man for many years and never did I hear him use a
phrase that even resembled this.
Lewis, by the way, was a Texan, complete with cowboy boots and a Texas
accent.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at November 25, 2006 02:21 PM