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.
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