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lenora_rose(warning: Boring probably even to other writers writing rambling)
... is scary. (It's also potentially the wrong term. But it's a term the layman will understand, and linguists will only grit their teeth a little.)
Retrofitting dialect into already crafted prose is HORRID.
It occurred to me though that having the members of the upper class in one country and the lower in another sounding the same was, well, not uncommon in fiction, but also unlikely. And with Kate Elliott's reasonably successful example (From the Spiritwalker trilogy, specifically Cold Fire) in front of me, I decided I shouldn't shy away.
Also, Jesua is damn proud not to be another noble brat. She'd consciously choose not to pass, linguistically.
I've done smaller linguistic tricks before: figuring out how to have a character write a letter in a language she's still not a completely fluent in (But has lots of time to work on drafts before she sends it) and still sound highly intelligent. (Having seen a full essay written by someone in that very position, her language is a lot closer to correct.) I've picked apart and reshaped a character's every line of dialogue. Several times, for several reasons, ranging from the dead simple (One character never says one word; not compulsively, subconsciously) to the complicated. This is kind of like doing that, writ large. In the end, I'm going to have to tweak a whole lot of Soldier of the Road.
The trick with dialect, as I've analyzed it in other works, is about fivefold, each individual part simple. (Whether I remotely succeed is another question.)
- Don't overdo it. Unless you're as brilliant as Burgess (I'm not) the reader wants to get the sense of difference, not the confusion of reading something wholly alien. also, any verbal tic repeated just once too often turns into a parody of itself.
- Use cases of grammatical quirk, word order, and emphasis rather than weird spellings. Not least because English speakers across the world won't pronounce things the same, so what seems to be a phonetic spelling to the writer is going to be a bloody nasty mouthful in another.
- Know what you're doing before you start. (I screwed this up. Twice, since I changed my mind about the source of the dialect after starting to try it out; originally attempting it based on a dialect from northern England, then realizing that was a wholly inappropriate source considering the history of the territory.)
- Most dialects are as grammatically consistent as "proper" language; in many cases, they have fewer irregularities. If Linguists can study and pick apart the rules of LOLcat dialect, they'd best be able to do the same with anything a writer invents.
- Often easiest to do by borrowing something from an extant dialect, creole, or language. If such is remotely applicable.
For examples of how to apply this to specific rules, Kate Elliott has a good summary of some of her choices here (And her consulting source.)
In my case, a number of her issues are inverted. Strictly speaking, the way my nobility speaks would be the creole (formed with the clash of their language with that of the greater empire to which the country used to belong; a motivation the peasants at the far side of their small territory would have no reason to share), and the way these particular peasants speak would be closer to the original language. But the noble speech is represented by middle Canadian standard "proper" English.
So instead I have to derive the speech based on the original extant language. If modern English is used to represent the creole, then officially, the closest appropriate equivalent for the peasants' speech would be to revert to Chaucerian English or even borrow from Saxon.
I know a lot of people who would have found that cool. But that wasn't how I decided to work out the dialect. Instead, I went and borrowed some aspects from another language that is vastly closer to what the people of these countries actually spoke when they arrived. (French. It's not a big secret, when Rosor's (foreign) name is occasionally altered to Larose even by nobility, and Jesua calls her mother Mamere. Also gives me an urge to watch more movies with French subtitles on, since my language skills are rusty.)
What I'm doing with The Poisoned Tongue right now is, after working them in to the start of the book and the sections taken from old drafts, trying to apply the dialect rules going forward, so as to set them in stone, *Then* go back and fix book two, when I have the rhythm ingrained.
Still, I don't give myself small issues to revise between drafts. Change a character's gender here, completely rewrite the way a not-small number of the characters speak there...
... is scary. (It's also potentially the wrong term. But it's a term the layman will understand, and linguists will only grit their teeth a little.)
Retrofitting dialect into already crafted prose is HORRID.
It occurred to me though that having the members of the upper class in one country and the lower in another sounding the same was, well, not uncommon in fiction, but also unlikely. And with Kate Elliott's reasonably successful example (From the Spiritwalker trilogy, specifically Cold Fire) in front of me, I decided I shouldn't shy away.
Also, Jesua is damn proud not to be another noble brat. She'd consciously choose not to pass, linguistically.
I've done smaller linguistic tricks before: figuring out how to have a character write a letter in a language she's still not a completely fluent in (But has lots of time to work on drafts before she sends it) and still sound highly intelligent. (Having seen a full essay written by someone in that very position, her language is a lot closer to correct.) I've picked apart and reshaped a character's every line of dialogue. Several times, for several reasons, ranging from the dead simple (One character never says one word; not compulsively, subconsciously) to the complicated. This is kind of like doing that, writ large. In the end, I'm going to have to tweak a whole lot of Soldier of the Road.
The trick with dialect, as I've analyzed it in other works, is about fivefold, each individual part simple. (Whether I remotely succeed is another question.)
- Don't overdo it. Unless you're as brilliant as Burgess (I'm not) the reader wants to get the sense of difference, not the confusion of reading something wholly alien. also, any verbal tic repeated just once too often turns into a parody of itself.
- Use cases of grammatical quirk, word order, and emphasis rather than weird spellings. Not least because English speakers across the world won't pronounce things the same, so what seems to be a phonetic spelling to the writer is going to be a bloody nasty mouthful in another.
- Know what you're doing before you start. (I screwed this up. Twice, since I changed my mind about the source of the dialect after starting to try it out; originally attempting it based on a dialect from northern England, then realizing that was a wholly inappropriate source considering the history of the territory.)
- Most dialects are as grammatically consistent as "proper" language; in many cases, they have fewer irregularities. If Linguists can study and pick apart the rules of LOLcat dialect, they'd best be able to do the same with anything a writer invents.
- Often easiest to do by borrowing something from an extant dialect, creole, or language. If such is remotely applicable.
For examples of how to apply this to specific rules, Kate Elliott has a good summary of some of her choices here (And her consulting source.)
In my case, a number of her issues are inverted. Strictly speaking, the way my nobility speaks would be the creole (formed with the clash of their language with that of the greater empire to which the country used to belong; a motivation the peasants at the far side of their small territory would have no reason to share), and the way these particular peasants speak would be closer to the original language. But the noble speech is represented by middle Canadian standard "proper" English.
So instead I have to derive the speech based on the original extant language. If modern English is used to represent the creole, then officially, the closest appropriate equivalent for the peasants' speech would be to revert to Chaucerian English or even borrow from Saxon.
I know a lot of people who would have found that cool. But that wasn't how I decided to work out the dialect. Instead, I went and borrowed some aspects from another language that is vastly closer to what the people of these countries actually spoke when they arrived. (French. It's not a big secret, when Rosor's (foreign) name is occasionally altered to Larose even by nobility, and Jesua calls her mother Mamere. Also gives me an urge to watch more movies with French subtitles on, since my language skills are rusty.)
What I'm doing with The Poisoned Tongue right now is, after working them in to the start of the book and the sections taken from old drafts, trying to apply the dialect rules going forward, so as to set them in stone, *Then* go back and fix book two, when I have the rhythm ingrained.
Still, I don't give myself small issues to revise between drafts. Change a character's gender here, completely rewrite the way a not-small number of the characters speak there...
no subject
Date: 2013-09-13 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-13 04:20 pm (UTC)