LL-L: "Orthography" LOWLANDS-L, 01.JUN.2000 (03) [E/S]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject: "Orthography"

> From: Roger Thijs [Roger.Thijs at village.uunet.be]
> Subject: Orthography
>
> I think it is an issue "how one should write in dialect":
> [examples deleted]
> The point is: A gives the real dialect, but hardly anybody can read it as

> written text. B does not give the dialect "as is", gives just a flavor of

> it, but is it easy to read and understand.
> So: do we need to accept a bi-linguism with written and spoken languages?

> Even for the dialects? (when one writes something down, it's mostly with
> the intention others can read it, I guess) Aren't written forms of
> languages not damned to be koin for a larger regional area, and more or
> less standardized?

When I started writing fiction in Scots I imagined that it would be
possible to use a standard form
of Scots in the narrative and dialect in the dialogue, but I've had to give
up on this idea, having
found that every now and again in the course of a story, a small snatch of
dialect can confuse
even expert readers of Scots who aren't completely familiar with my
particular dialect. I usually get
John Tait to read my stories - so you'll realise I really do mean experts!

Here's an example of John's critique on a snatch of dialect from one of my
stories:

<quote> "Still, yes duin no a bad job". This disna mak sense ti me. Is it
ye'v or yes'v? Mibbie it
wad be obvious ti somebodie at wad spaek that wey, but I canna lift it.
Aiblins <ye's> ti shaw the
missin v, an shaw at it's no the affirmative? Or is it 'done' as a
preterite, like 'I done it'? In this case,
aiblins 'yous' raither nor 'yes' wad dae the trick? Again, wad ye say duin
[dIn] as a preterite? I'v aye  haurd fowk say [dVn]. This is mibbie like
cam an came again, suggestin at the convergent tenses is  English lens?
</quote>

[canna lift - "can't understand", aiblins - "perhaps", aye - "always", lens
- "loans"]

As you see, my simple dialect sentence, "Still, yes duin no a bad job" is
only a representation of
the dialect in a very standard Scots spelling, and yet John finds it
confusing on account of the
juxtaposition of two unfamiliar items of grammar that leave the
possibilities wide open for him,
although it can mean only one thing to me. And if I'd tried to give a
faithful representation of the
dialect, things could only get worse ("Still, eez din no a baud joab").

So I've concluded that "faithful" dialect writing is not a good medium of
communication, even if
reasonably standard spellings are used to represent the words. These days
I've decided that when
writing a story in standard Scots any representation of dialect needs to be
done with careful
choice of variants that Scots who aren't familiar with the dialect will
still understand, at least from
context. This of course means that what actually gets written will be
nowhere near what the dialect
speaker would have said.

I think there's also a fallacy in the idea that native speakers _can_ write
faithful representations of
their dialect. Often in modern "dialect" writing in Scots one comes across
bizarre hypercorrections
and literary turns of phrase that a speaker in the dialect couldn't
possibly have said, eg "Thaim
wha git thersels inti sic dire strechts" (which would almost certainly have
been said "Thaim as [or
at] gits thersels inti sic dire straits"). It's also of limited value - for
example, Burns is writing dialect
(rather than his usual standard Scots) when he writes "Whare ye gaun?" -
but nobody really
knows how he would have pronounced this (I would pronounce it just as he
writes it, but most
Scots wouldn't, so it's quite likely that he didn't - yes it's confusing,
that's the point I'm making!).

Dialect writers can also get confused over how grammatical structures are
used in their own
speech. For example, I used to struggle with narrative sentences such as
this in Scots:

"A tak the gate she pynts, but A loss ma nerves whan A keek throu the
windae an see aa the
fowk."

Recently John pointed out that a sentence like this should be in the
present historic tense, which
is different in Scots from most Englsih dialects:

"A taks the gate she pynts, but A losses ma nerves whan A keeks throu the
windae an sees aa the fowk."

The strange thing is that this is exactly what I would say in narrating a
story myself, and in fact I
can remember attempting to add these "s"es but having given up on them. I
was incapable of
writing it properly until the relevant grammatical principle was pointed
out. I also went through
similar experiences when reading Purves's Scots Grammar - he would point
out things that I say,
but I would never have thought of writing them.

In summary, I'd say that dialect writing can only be done successfully by
linguists trained in
phonetic transcription, or by native speakers with a lot of experience and
instruction in writing
their dialect. It can't be done by people making naive attempts to write
exactly how they speak
(especially not when they've been taught some other form of writing in
school). And even given all that, it's _not_ a satisfactory form of
communication unless intended for a fairly patient audience
who are also completely familiar with the dialect.

(I could get on to Irvine Welsh now, but perhaps in another maily...)

Sandy http://scotstext.org

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