Can you understand this patois? 325 words

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Hey pH,

I thought it was more or less fine, just got hung on one word - siddung - but I could get the rest of the meaning from the sentence.

Which oddly I can live with - my favourite book mostly written in patois is Trainspotting, and that drops back into middle-class for a fair chunk of it :), and it took me a while to figure out words like 'Likesay'.

As for dropping into and out of patois, I can totally get it - I can even on occasion do that myself with Edinburgh vernacular, therefore I imagine that you've experienced a lot of people in London drifting between various combos!
 
Think I got most of it. It's no thicker than the patois used by Gibson in Neuromancer or Morrison in the Invisibles.
 
Hi All,

Finally able to reply properly.

What I'll end up doing is cutting the scene so it's lower in word count. It's interesting seeing the repsonses here, and I was considering starting another thread about pidgin and patois because I think a rather political issue has come up in this crit from the assumption about people from a different cultural capital. Thing is, that might get heated and lead to forbidden current affairs-y things so, even though it's prob bad form for me to do so within this crit, I will, and hope I don't overstate things .

It's really been interesing seeing what people have noted here as concerns.

This scene is so far 2,4K~

I don't like to put up huge crits over 1k if I can help it, so I only used the 300ish bit to see if people could carry the jist of the conversation, not whether or not I should be doing it this way or that. (I'll go on record as saying as far as making people stop and work things out, I don't care. I don't believe this 'throwing someone out of the story' is a 'real' thing, and I think it's something we may say as writers writing for writers, rather than readers - but that's maybe just my own twisted opinion ;) )

But in the meantime.

Dunno, mi nevah see ‘im suh,’

I think this is-
dunno, I (me) never saw (see) him, Sir -

'Suh' is an almost invisible or filler-word used like 'dem'. It means exactly as TJ said (quote below) and it can mean 'so', or 'like that', or 'there'. That's the funny thing about patois; it's filled with nuance depending on context whilst at the same time not being codified (unlike those hopeless sites that 'claim' this and that which brings me to:

but I still wanted to use the dialect as a means to underscore cultural differences between groups of characters … So I searched and I searched; I found a lot of blogs on the subject, and most of them were crap … but this one made sense, to me: 'Writing Accents and Dialects', over at QuickandDirtyTips. It advocates for reliance on lexis and appropriate grammar, to convey heteroglossia, rather than attempting to represent accents 'phonetically', through non-standard spellings

Yes! I need to undescore the same and agree completely; I have no interest in writing anything for a mass majority, so that they can be comfortable and not get 'thrown/dragged' (et al) out of the narrative. I'm, usually the only - or one of few - white people in my work or social circle, and I when a diverse crowd - especially with such a complicated history - get together, dialogue is always a mix of patois, pidgin, english and mock accents (especially West Africans) It's a badge of honour/membership/enfranchisement that is slipped into when around others of a similar background are present, or alternatively, when someone is so completely different (i.e white) and are then 'othered' in good spirits if the people involved feel secure around each other.

'Ha, man, Ah'm feelin' propor radgie, leek. Sum gadgie's doonched wor mortor, see Ah stotted a brick of his.'

Howay man, divvent dunshus! ;)

The only word I'm not sure of is "siddung".

I'll change that. It's funny because three people in this thread struggled with it, and I was sure that was the one word that I think of as kinda 'famous' in caribbean patois. :eek: I've seen it written siddon, sid don, siddung, depending on region. I think I can cut it or change it for another phrase if it's too challenging.

I think a vague sense of missing some of the words makes it more realistic to a white bread POV, even if you figure them out down the line from context.

Thanks, this is my intention, but I think context may be more important than I've given time for in my passage, so I'll have to make sure it's clearer.

.and I'm not sure that it is. If you want to inform the reader that Craig slips in and out of patois occasionally, a line or two probably would have sufficed?

It's something he does a lot because it's something that happens a lot. And the more drunk or altered they get - or the more people of similar background are around - the broader it becomes. Luckily they're not always drunk :)

Secondly, I think any writer is in danger of being called out for doing this. Rather than try to explain, I'll try to illustrate by asking how much readers would tolerate the writing of a French character whose dialogue was routinely written like this: "Ai um frum Fronce, ze cuntry ahcross ze chanel"?

This is an imprecise comparison. Creolised langauges are not the same as bad 'Allo 'Allo accents. When a West African uses pidgin or a caribbean, patois, they are not speaking from an origin of using an accent, but embracing cultural heritage. I'd completely agree if I was writing a Jamaican stereotype, and just writing a phonetic reprsentation of Jamaican English, but I'm writing an altered langauge.

There's quite a bit of pidgin in The Expanse - it's neither subtitled, not explained. It's representative of a fractured, and diverse community and I would argue it's far less accessible than Jamaican patois. In a recent short I wrote, a few of the betas came back with very positive coments on the pidgin I'd made up for them (Maarten). The thing is, it's not English with European and Asian inflections (for example), but a new langauge that is at times impenetrable.

However, do you really know people who do this?
What I mean is that he has a fair grasp of the language that the majority here are speaking. What is the purpose of shifting in and out of a patois?

Yes, every day, as I said above. They certainly don't moderate their language because they feel they 'should' for the white man!

Is this meant to be a heavily comedic scene? The purpose of communication is to communicate and slipping into the patois when you know the words in the other language seems a bit odd especially when there are no other Jamaicans in the scene.

Fair point. Neil and Willie are white, the other three aren't. Certainly in a diverse community such as London, there appear to be complex demarcations between minorities. Elements of pidgin and patois are understood here by non pidgin speakers, and as soon as any of my colleagues or friends have known that I understand it, they revert to it often. For example my business partner or dancers will say 'I dey hung-oh' which means 'I'm hungry'. A lot of City folk will know 'I dey' means 'I'm...' and can work out from there.

It's essentially showing how deep the trust is between these people (Although Jose -Brazilian - is a newcomer) that they can speak like this to each other.

Slipping the one piece of non-encoded dialogue into the character's speech creates a suggestion that he's deliberately being rude and perhaps with the intention of trying to be funny.

Exactly ;)

‘Dunno, mi nevah see ‘im suh,’
This one I think I got: "Don't know, I've never seen him like this".

Yup!

(NB Watch the inverted comma before "'im" as it's the wrong way round.)

That's the autoformat on the font I think. If I use the default all the inverted commas, apostrophes in Scrivener are straight, so I'm guessing it's a copy/paste issue.

I wondered if he means she's stroppy, or simply not a person who is easy to live/be with, but I couldn't be sure.

Yep. You're not easy = hard work. It's also a sort of compliment.

‘Di white people dem taak.’
On first read I thought this was "The white people do talk" but that didn't make a lot of sense in context. I then wondered if "dem taak" was something in relation to Jose, ie something like "are stupid" but I'm not sure if Jose is white as far as Craig is concerned as he's Brazilian. Then I began to think he might be explaining that he'd fallen into white people's speech with the earlier bit which was out of patois. Basically, I've no idea what this is.

Essentially, it's mean to be a case of; 'the white people are talking about 'us' (because YOU'RE acting weird)'

‘Mi knoooo!’
"I know!"? But that doesn't seem to justify the exclamation mark, or, indeed, be worth saying, so I'm not sure.

When it's said like this, it's like a stroppy teenage/angry way of snapping.

It's good to see more of the present day story. Looking forward to another nugget of it soon!

Are you sure ;)

I wonder how Jamaican's write dialogue.

Jamaican patois has preferences that are personal. For example, me can be seen often as mi or me, di or de, and I gave the siddung example above. It's not as strongly codified or notated as English.

Apparently there is specific spelling and grammer for patois and separate Jamaican English. Phyrebrat, are you using this format or something else?

See above.

Thanks once again for such interesting responses, this has been truly surprising and valuable for me. I'll have a bash at cutting and cleaning and see if that helps.

pH
 
Funnily enough I had no problem with "siddung". I didn't have much trouble understanding all of it, or at least the gist of all of it. I think that you could write a reasonable amount of a novel in patois or slang, provided that the words around it gave a sense of meaning. I assumed that "britva" in A Clockwork Orange was a knife: it was actually a razor, but was used in much the same way.

My problem with this is the same as my problem with the use of French-style punctuation of dialogue in an English novel ( -How are you, he said instead of "How are you," he said). It makes it harder to read, and unless there is a substantial gain in return, I don't think it's worth it. I'm wary of anything that gets in the way of clarity (perhaps unduly so). It is a tricky one, though. The other thing I'd mention from this scene is that, because nothing more seems to be happening beyond showing that Craig knows patois, I'd assume that this was setting up a later scene where it would be useful to the plot, Chekov's gun style.

EDIT: I didn't see this earlier:

I have no interest in writing anything for a mass majority, so that they can be comfortable and not get 'thrown/dragged' (et al) out of the narrative.

but I think my general point still stands.
 
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Yes, I agree; it’s important to find that balance, and that’s why I’m asking for ‘understanding’ on the content.

One of the problems I’d not anticipated is how people unfamiliar with patois will also have a problem parsing the context, or indeed what the characters are doing and thinking, because the unfamiliarity throws them for a loop. It’s something I was completely unprepared for.

There’s been patois before this pointbut it’s the first time all characters are on-set together. Craig’s been painfully shy and polite up till now and this is him presenting a far more relaxed participation with the others.
pH
 
There's quite a bit of pidgin in The Expanse - it's neither subtitled, not explained. It's representative of a fractured, and diverse community and I would argue it's far less accessible than Jamaican patois
There's a difference, though. Those bits in the expanse are just filler that the reader is not really expected to decipher all that Portuguese, outside of by context. But you're expecting people to treat the patois as lightly encoded English and figure it out, as if it were pidgin.

It certainly isn't patois' fault that it can be read as if it was just pidgin, but it does run the risk of making your audience think of Cool Runnings or Feersum Endjinn because they aren't going to be able to tell the difference between an actual language offshoot of English and some phonetic stuff you made up.
 
I’m possibly misunderstanding your point but;

I’d strongly disagree that the plentiful pidgin in The Expanse is filler and not important. (btw, that also sounds like a majority or white-centric opinion). I’d also argue that The Expanse’s use of creolised language is at odds with what people have claimed about patois or pidgin being unnecessarily distracting for a reader.

Back to my crit, though; I didn’t make the phonetic stuff up at all. None of this is made up. Unless you identify ‘mi knooooo’ as being represented ideally as ‘mi kno’. But then would an English-writing author be cautioned against someone saying ‘I knooooooow,’ because it’s phonetic? Certainly not in books I’ve read.

If someone’s sole engagement is with stereotypical representations such as Cool Runnings then that’s on them. I’m writing authentically (and for the record three of my colleagues and a mate - all Jamaican heritage of varying degree - had read the patois before posting it here in crits and had nothing to say) and can’t control someone’s cultural naïveté.

Just to reiterate, the purpose of me asking crit here was whether a reader could understand it or not, not whether I should, or how I should go about it.

I do find the resistance to me doing this somewhere between bemusing and scary. My understanding of fantasy and sf is that it has always been ripe ground for exploring ‘othered’ people and seeing things from a different perspective.

What I’m essentially hearing is ‘I don’t like this because it doesn’t serve me what I want in the way I want it/am used to it’ and for that I have no answer.

Funnily enough when it comes to this wip, I have till now prioritised advice and recommendations from others over my own thoughts. That is because in previous crits it’s been about historical details writing in different ‘epochs’. The section I’m now writing is present day and my knowledge of Afro-Caribbean culture is very broad. Therefore the concerns I have in this present day section are less to do with research and more to do with finding a balance for a largely white audience.

pH
 
I’m possibly misunderstanding your point but;

I’d strongly disagree that the plentiful pidgin in The Expanse is filler and not important. (btw, that also sounds like a majority or white-centric opinion). I’d also argue that The Expanse’s use of creolised language is at odds with what people have claimed about patois or pidgin being unnecessarily distracting for a reader.

Then I shouldn't have used the word "filler", because that sounds like it is unimportant for the story, when I meant it is filler as far as decoding meaning. Undecipherable words in stories have a function, but that function is not to serve as units of meaning, but to do something else. In the Expanse, they are there to underline the cultural differences between the various groups and for realism. But if the author has no expectation of the average reader being able to extract verbatim meaning, they serve a role much more like sound effects.

No matter how many time Colossus starts with "Bozhe moi!", X-Men readers are never going to decode that into anything more than "Russian exclamation of surprise". There is not enough context or language similarity to figure out that it means "My God!" instead of "Holy crap!" or "Golly!" or the perennial comics favorite "Blast!", so readers only have a surface understanding of what's being said. The Belter language in the Expanse follows the same pattern: "Something something punch Holden something, something something." The author could have used completely invented words for most of it and projected identical meaning, but with a different cultural significance.

Gaff : Captain Bryant toka. Meni-o mae-yo.
Deckard : Bryant, huh?

But you're using patois like phonetic, where you expect the reader to decode it based on the similarities to English, even if they drop a word or two like "su" in the process. Because the reader understands that they are able to extract explicit meaning, they read and re-read patois passages that would be glossed over if they were Russian or Klingon. That's the "distracting" difference, and why I compared what you wrote to Feersum Endjinn.

Is that clearer? Sorry to be the white guy.



As far as the wip goes, the readability problem is partially format. You have difficult dialogue lines buried inside of descriptive sentences, which slows the eye enough when it is all Queen's English, but gets really challenging when you have to change reading cadence to decode. It might all work better if you formatted it more like this with dialogue all on the left margin:

‘Aii, you not easy, likkle gyal, you not easy at haaall.’ Craig said, taking it in good spirits.

They all laughed apart from Jose who was still turning, inhaling the grounds.

‘Seriously, bro, what’s up with the circling? Di white people dem taak.’’ Craig said, slipping briefly out of his patois until he noticed Kate's smile.
 
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I have a little experience with other Caribbean patois, and other variations of English, so I may not be the focus group on this.

Understood it perfectly. The only unfamiliar word was siddung, but I understood it fine. Even then, it was only the 'g' which made it look odd to my immediate reading of it.

As to slipping in and out of patois and speech patterns, in general, yes. It's fine. Seen it plenty of times. It's all about who you're speaking to, in what setting, which context, and how you're feeling (like you say, in this case, it's Craig relaxing and being himself around others). Actually done similar myself, drifting between languages in a multilingual group, where the conversation didn't/couldn't be fully expressed in one tongue. And, patois definitely form their own language rules.
 
One of the problems I’d not anticipated is how people unfamiliar with patois will also have a problem parsing the context, or indeed what the characters are doing and thinking, because the unfamiliarity throws them for a loop. It’s something I was completely unprepared for.
Last decade, while I was still teaching Web site design, customers' recognition of controls was a bit of a thing. The problem boils down to whether a designer is going to do a lot of 'hand-holding' (i.e. making everything super-easy, by using lots of labels, well-known symbols, bog-standard colour schemes, and such as) or be a little more innovative but 'train' customers to recognise/use (outwardly) unfamiliar controls. The use of heteroglossia in fiction raises similar issues: the author needs some way to train readers to comprehend the unfamiliar terms. Context is one way. I also use a lot of footnotes.:whistle:
 
Understood it perfectly. The only unfamiliar word was siddung, but I understood it fine. Even then, it was only the 'g' which made it look odd to my immediate reading of it.
What Abernovo said. I'd've understood the whole thing, were it written 'siddun' instead of 'siddung'. But I've been teaching ESL for a while, so I've heard English spoken many different ways.
 
Probably coming at this too late to be of any use, but I understood it perfectly. What's more, I think it's written with wit and in your usual, rolling style.

@Onyx, I'm not sure why you thought of Feersum Endjinn from wrt this. I read FE and this feels nothing like it at all. The whole point of FE is that it's artificial phoneticism, and this is filled with patois colloquialisms.
 
Probably coming at this too late to be of any use, but I understood it perfectly. What's more, I think it's written with wit and in your usual, rolling style.

@Onyx, I'm not sure why you thought of Feersum Endjinn from wrt this. I read FE and this feels nothing like it at all. The whole point of FE is that it's artificial phoneticism, and this is filled with patois colloquialisms.
It isn't written like FE, but I was making a comparison between the use of opaquely encoded foreign language; "Pamplemousse!" and something an English reader is capable of deciphering; "Iffin you ain't the grannaddi of all liars!". No amount of context or phonetics is going to turn "pamplemousse" into "grapefruit", but the reader will assume that the single word with the exclamation mark serves a role of an exclamation like "Gadzooks!" - which is what happens when we read Belter in the Expanse. The second example, like patois, contains enough English and English sounding words for someone very unfamiliar with the patois to turn into English, just as we do with those chapters of FE.

With no disrespect to patois, it is a form of English and Phyrebrat expects English readers to be largely able to read it. He would have no such expectations if the character kept dropping into Korean.
 
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