Hi, Dallas!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:

AH>  Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first
AH>  person.

                            [...]

DH>  It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in
DH>  works by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James
DH>  Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author is
DH>  trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect
DH>  -- and in order to do so it's often necessary to spell
DH>  a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the way the
DH>  character would have done.


          Exactly....  :-)



DH>  In addition, we must remember the audience for which the
DH>  piece was written.


          Uh-huh.  With the invention of the printing press & the rise of the
middle class their target audience was the paterfamilias who would purchase a
novel *he* liked the looks of... and then read it aloud to the entire family.



DH>  For example, a British audience of Stevenson's time might
DH>  not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as a
DH>  sailor would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver
DH>  he spells it "gunnel" to give the right sound.


          | Adding the proviso that there may be umpteen different editions of
classics such as TREASURE ISLAND & various editors may have their own ideas:

          Yes.  It wouldn't be in anybody's best interests to delay the action
while Papa struggles with "forecastle" or "boatswain", either.  The author who
knows which side his bread is buttered on may use apostrophes to represent the
letters and/or the syllables an experienced sailor would probably omit when he
is trying to make himself understood over a howling gale.  We have other words
like that in English... "Worcestershire", for example.  In such cases I figure
the pronunciation may have changed where the spelling hasn't, but my life does
not depend on how quickly I can get the idea across to folks from Russia.  And
if they want to look it up the standard spelling usually works better....  ;-)



DH>  Pi comes from India, and we don't know (at least, I don't
DH>  know!) how he would normally speak - and would he even think
DH>  in English or is it translated for us without telling us?


          Perhaps we don't need to know.  In this story he's alone most of the
time, and when he finally runs aground in Mexico (or wherever) the first human
beings he meets don't speak English.  Nowadays international publishing houses
employ people to massage an author's dialect so that readers from the US won't
get upset because s/he uses British English & readers from elsewhere won't get
upset because s/he doesn't, but grade eight errors seem to be universal.  :-))




--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+
 * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)