Joel Chandler Harris's eye-dialect

[David Bergdahl]

The work to consult by a dialectologist is Sumner Ives' "Dialect
Differentiation in the Stories of Joel Chandler Harris," American
Literature, 27 (Mar 55), 58-96.  Raven I McDavid, Jr says that Ives "has
shown that within the limits of the English alphabet, Harris has been
remarkably accurate and effective in presenting the speech of a
plantation Negro as heard by a cultivated white Southerner--although
Auslaender often have difficulty in understanding the phonetic basis of
Harris's orthography"  [in the one-volume Mencken, Am Lang, p. 476].

--db
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