A quick corrective. In Benito Cereno the balck characters are Africans. In
the other examples the Black speech is entirely rural and mostly
non-literate. There's a fair amount of published work by Black writers in
the US from the 18th and 19th centuries, some taken down and edited by
others, but a lot in their own hand. Many didn't speak Black dialect, of
which there were and are several. In the early 20th century the folklorists
descended upon isolated Black settlements, notably in the Gulla-speaking
Georgia sea islands, and transcribed material in the local dialects, which
probably hadn't changed much in a century or two. The best known, of
course, is Zora neale Hurston.
A standardized Black dialect was largely a media invention, beginning with
minstrel shows and continuing into radio.
To put this into perspective, dialect writing in the US and Canada was
largely limited to dialect humor in the late 19th-early 20th centuries,
whatever the dialect and color of the protagonist.
Mark
At 06:12 PM 3/17/2005, you wrote:
> > 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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