Subj : There is/there are
To   : Ardith Hinton
From : Dallas Hinton
Date : Fri Mar 02 2018 18:00:57

Hi Ardith -- on May 23 2013 at 21:23, you wrote:

AH>          Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first
AH> person.  As a translator of stories you need to be aware of the
[...]
AH> errors from time to time, however... or uses a variant spelling in
AH> preference to the more conventional "gunwale"... that's in
AH> character!  At a fairly similar age Huckleberry Finn was speaking as
AH> a kid who had skipped out of school & who lived in the southeastern
AH> US would have spoken in Mark Twain's day.  I don't expect such
AH> fictitious personages to dot all the i's & cross all the t's
AH> correctly.  When other adults here ask me to "find two errors,
AH> please" I see they're operating on a much more advanced level....
AH> ;-)

It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in works by Mark Twain, 
Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author 
is trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect -- and in order to do 
so it's often necessary to spell a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the way 
the character would have done. In addition, we must remember the audience for 
which the piece was written. For example, a British audience of Stevenson's 
time might not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as a sailor 
would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver he spells it "gunnel" to 
give the right sound.

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


Cheers... Dallas

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