irritating accents
I don't mean spoken accents, I think they are great.
What I'm talking about is reading accents.
I'm currently reading an e-book in which the writer tries to convey the accent of the area and its people.
For instance: when someone is saying "owner" it is written as ownah ; "reader" becomes readah; "never" becomes nevah, and so on throughout the book.
Walkah, foreignah, ovah.
I find this extremely irritating.
Readers tend to read in whatever accent they themselves have grown up with, so correct spelling should be used instead of the cutesy made up accent.
It just interrupts the flow of the story when the reader has to mentally pause at each accent.
If people naturally say "nevah" instead of never, then that is how it will sound in their heads even when written as never.
When I get to the end of the book, if there is a link to either rate the story or contact the author, I may make this suggestion to him. And quite possibly never read another book written by this person.
Thoughts?
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That is irritating, when pervasive in a book. It can sometimes be useful to emphasize the fact that a character is speaking with an accent distinctly different from that of the reader, but even then, it's best used sparingly. Proficient readers read by recognizing whole words and morphemes, not by sounding them out letter-by-letter, so any deviation from standard spelling will register as jarring and make reading more difficult.
ReplyDeleteInfidel753; thank you, pervasive is exactly the right word. It is everywhere in this particular story. I'm only continuing to read because the storyline is a good one.
DeleteI tend to agree, tho in my usual way I have a shade of ambivalence lol -- sometimes it works for me & sometimes it doesn't -- my first experience with it was when I was about 7 & my older brothers & I tried to read aloud a Mark Twain story filled with it -- a short story about a jumping frog contest that was near impossible for us little ones to understand -- but we did it!
DeleteI am in total agreement. And yes, a review wouldn't go astray.
ReplyDeleteElephant's Child; I don't usually do reviews, but in this case I will if there is a link to do so.
DeleteI agree. Would drive me nuts. In fact I have one book with so-called Platt, that´s what they speak at the coast. There is a radio show on this and Ingo loves to listen - he understands by now. Me... not so much. I think sneaking in a word here and there is OK, but not the whole text!
ReplyDeleteCan be confusing. When someone from Emden called me in the... tadaaa, "arvo" with "Moin" I answered "Guten Morgen" automatically, not knowing there is means but "hello". My colleagues had fun (on me).
Iris Flavia; I agree, sneaking in a word here or there is much better than saturating the text this way. I have often said good morning by mistake, we just laugh it off and say "where is my brain right now?"
DeleteLanguage changes fast. Now many here say "Moin", or "Moin, Moin".
DeleteCrazy, yet funny. Also cause others still look confused when it´s past morning!
And my Spanish colleague always, no matter how late starts with "Good morning" - must some Spanish joke.
I tend to agree.
ReplyDeleteBob; thank you. The writer would have done better by having his character note that the local population spoke with a particular accent and left it at at that.
DeleteDreadful and no need for that at all. We generally know the local setting of a book and mentally impose accents, or not. Shaking my head at the absurdity.
ReplyDeleteAndrew; exactly right, but I'm confused more by the story being set in Maine and I didn't think they spoke that way up there. Of course I've never been to Maine, so I wouldn't know for sure.
DeleteIn coastal and central Maine, it is true we tend to drop the r's at the ends of words, but rendering it as ah instead, is a crude approximation that doesn't come close to capturing the flavor and nuance at all. Agreed, better to just note the accent exists and perhaps that it's stronger in older or more rural characters than attempt to show it this way.
DeleteOr perhaps have the character use an expression that people "from away" wouldn't say, like "hard telling, not knowing" or "glare of ice" or "that ain't good". Note I resisted "hahd tellin', not knowin'"!!!
DeleteLyn Marie; welcome to drifting. I thought the dropping of the "R" was mostly a Southern thing, thank you for setting me straight. Here in Australia, we also don't pronounce our R's, but like you said, rendering it "ah" is just wrong.
DeleteIt's a dreadful thing River, I agree. I've seen "Oirish" accents portrayed liked this. There's no need for it. I am writing a book where a heavily accented Jewish survivor has a prominent role and I have written - briefly - that the most challenging part of speaking English for him was in pronouncing "ws" as they all come out "vs", but I don't lay on the 2X4s in the dialogue as the reader knows already. An editor should have caught all this in the book you're reading. I know I do when I'm editing other works.
ReplyDeleteXO
WWW
WWW; you are writing it the correct way and the reader will know what you mean now that you have explained his difficulty. My own parents had difficulty with Y and J being interchanged as they were from Germany and things like Jug were pronounced Yug while Yellow became Jellow. I sometimes wonder if the e-books that are free have been tossed in unedited, with the spelling and grammar mistakes I find in them.
DeleteTotally agree on the written accents. Think you ought to contact the author and let him know it took so much from the story. I'm sure he thought he was being clever and adding flavor to a story instead of annoying the reader.
ReplyDeleteArkansas Patti; I think I will definitely contact the author on this. I will finish the book first and see if there is a link on the final page, otherwise I will look him up online.
DeleteThat annoys me, too. However, unless the author chose the narrator I don't think they don't have much say in the final result
ReplyDeleteKathy G; you are assuming this is an audio book? it isn't. I don't do those. I prefer the reading to be in my own voice in my own head.
DeleteWell I never, that would be irritating. I do know that when my dad was alive and I used to order his reading DVD's he would always ask me for a couple of particular readers, he didn't like the others as their voices were hard to listen to, so he used to say...but he was legally blind.
ReplyDeleteMargaret D; it's good your dad was able to choose his readers, with audible e-books apparently you can't. I don't have audio books anyway, so it isn't a problem for me. It's bad enough in this written form to have the accent made so obvious.
DeleteI have never read an e-book. I think it would be acceptable to try to represent an accent within the inverted commas - otherwise the words that are spoken.
ReplyDeleteYorkshire Pudding; in the case of this book it would mean an awful lot of inverted commas. The "ah" is so liberally sprinkled. I think it would have been better simply to have the character note that the people of the town speak with an accent.
DeleteWhile i do Cajun jokes with such a "written" accent, it's for a short joke, so i hope it's not irritating. If i were writing a long story, i wouldn't do it that way.
ReplyDeletemessymimi; in your short jokes it isn't at all irritating and you capture it well.
DeleteThank you!
Deletemessymimi, your Cajun jokes came to my mind as an appropriate way of using written accent, while reading here. But normally - and for longer texts - I totally agree with River (and the majority of the commentors here) that writing in an accent is hard to pull off, harder to do well, and hardest to do withour irritating the reader.
DeleteIt is especially annoying, and even confusing, for people whose mother tongue is not English.
ReplyDelete