> When it comes to language, I think any quest for an "authentic" speech
> will inevitably get snarled up in dense thickets of philology. And as
> thickets come, there are no denser...
>
> Dominic
Yup.
It's a narrow example, but I became interested in an aspect of this when I
came on "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (the original, not the Styron novel)
transcribed the night before his execution by a white middle-class New York
reporter, which made Turner sound like a white [etc.] ...
Par for the course, and a stunning example of what in my wilder moments I'm
inclined to describe as "linguistic genocide".
... what itched my brain was that the only examples of "authentic" (?) black
19thC American speech -- Mark Twain, Melville in "Benito Cerrino", _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ and Joel Chandler Harris -- that I could call to mind were all
by white middle class [etc] ...
I may be missing something, or lots of texts, but this always puzzled me.
Alice Walker has a ferocious denunciation of Harris (that I disagree with)
along the lines that he stole or expropriated the language.
The only comparable English example that I can think of is Francis Berry in
"Morant Bay".
To go back to the Glasgow Language Wars, I was in a pub once when Tom
Leonard and Jim Kelman were discussing how you could tell exactly which side
of a housing estate someone was brought up on -- turned on the distinction
between "yin" and "wan" -- "wan i uz, Jimmy," versus "the Big Yin.
My ear was never that good, but it was interesting to hear the two discuss
this.
It's also interesting to compare James Kelman's early story, "Nice tae be
nice", with almost everything else he's written. He and Tom Leonard adopted
quite different strategies in this area.
Robin
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