What are you currently reading? (part 2)

[vijayjohn]

I forgot to mention that I was also reading Colloquial Amharic and Colloquial Hebrew. I'd like to get back to those.

[TheStrayCat]

I finished Rationality by Steven Pinker and The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. Right now I'm reading David y Goliat by Malcolm Gladwell in a Spanish translation.

[azhong]

I finished... The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.

I happened to read through the first page of this novel about one week ago because the film was so famous. And I have a question, please.
I intended to have a look at its language register and had expected the register will be somewhat vulgar since the narrator seems not so well-educated. The passages I've read, attached below, are talking about the reasons he become in jail and that he can get anything for the other prisoners. But I can't see which phrases are vulgar or less formal. Could you please point it out for me if any? Thank you in advance if you reply.
Or you can just tell me your objective comments on the novel. Do you think it is as good among books as the film among films?

► Show Spoiler

Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess--I'm
the guy who can get it for you. Tailor made cigarettes, a bag of reefer if you're
partial to that, a bottle of brandy to celebrate your son or daughter's high
school graduation, or anything else within reason, that is. It wasn't always that way.

I came to Shawshank when I was just twenty, and I am one of the few people in
our happy little family willing to own up to what he did. I committed murder. I
put a large insurance policy on my wife -- who was three years older than I was --
and then I fixed the brakes on the Chevrolet coupe her father had given us as a
wedding present. It worked out exactly as I had planned -- except I hadn't planned
on her stopping to pick up the neighbor woman and the neighbor woman’s infant son
on their way down Castle Hill and into town. The brakes let go and the car
crashed through the bushes at the edge of the town common, gathering speed.
Bystanders said it must have been doing fifty or better when it hit the base of
the Civil War statue and burst into flames.

I also hadn't planned on getting caught, but caught I was. I got a season's pass
into this place. Maine has no death-penalty, but the District Attorney saw to it
that I was tried for all three deaths and given three life sentences, to run one
after the other. That fixed up any chance of parole I might have for a long,
long time. The judge called what I had done "a hideous, heinous crime," and it
was; but it is also in the past now. You can look it up in the yellowing files
of the Castle Rock Call, where the big headlines announcing my conviction look
sort of funny and antique next to the news of Hitler and Mussolini and FDR's
alphabet soup agencies.

Have I rehabilitated myself, you ask? I don't even know what that word means, at
least as far as prisons and corrections go. I think it's a politician's word. It
may have some other meaning, and it may be that I will have a chance to find
out, but that is the future - something cons teach themselves not to think
about. I was young, good-looking, and from the poor side of town. I knocked up a
pretty, sulky, headstrong girl who lived in one of the fine old houses on
Carbine Street. Her father was agreeable to the marriage if I would take a job
in the optical company he owned and "work my way up." I found out that what he
really had in mind was keeping me in his house and under his thumb, like a
disagreeable pet that has not quite been housebroken and which may bite. Enough
hate eventually piled up to cause me to do what I did. Given a second chance, I
would not do it again, but I'm not sure that means I am rehabilitated.
Anyway, it's not me I want to tell you about; I want to tell you about a guy
named Andy Dufresne. But before I can tell you about Andy, I have to explain a
few other things about myself. It won't take long.

[TheStrayCat]

But I can't see which phrases are vulgar or less formal. Could you please point it out for me if any? Thank you in advance if you reply.

I'm not a native English speaker either and had certain difficulty with some words used in the book as well, especially prison slang terms. In the passage you posted I'd say the used language is pretty regular though - the only unambiguously informal words I see are reefer and knock up. But I admit that occasionally I was too lazy to look up a unfamiliar word in a dictionary when the meaning was more or less clear to me from the context or simply not too important for understanding the plot. 😉

Or you can just tell me your objective comments on the novel. Do you think it is as good among books as the film among films?

Did you mean my subjective comments, since other people who have read it might have a different opinion? I found it quite enjoyable even though maybe not as much as some other King's novels that I have read. Not sure about the movie because I didn't watch it. But again, that's just my personal opinion.

[vijayjohn]

The Croatian article about the museum ultimately turned out not to be so bad since it explained some things to me about this museum and the relevant history and science I would have had no way of knowing otherwise. I think it could have probably been written better, though. I then read part of the trilingual guide to Yakutsk I've been reading lately and just finished another chapter of Kızlarıma Mektuplar (chapter 4, which seems to talk a lot about certain words having to do with the weather and especially words for 'rainbow' in a few languages, particularly English, French, and Turkish). Next I'll read part of my copy in Arabic of ألف ليلة وليلة, perhaps best known in English as Arabian Nights.

But I can't see which phrases are vulgar or less formal. Could you please point it out for me if any? Thank you in advance if you reply.

I'm not a native English speaker either and had certain difficulty with some words used in the book as well, especially prison slang terms. In the passage you posted I'd say the used language is pretty regular though - the only unambiguously informal words I see are reefer and knock up.

Personally, work my way up strikes me as somewhat informal as well.

[Linguaphile]

Here's what I'm currently reading (all are pretty interesting so far):
North to Paradise by Ousman Umar
Atomic Steppe by Togzhan Kassenova
Mitme näo ja nimega by Einar Sanden
Cuando los chinos hablan by Ana Fuentes

[vijayjohn]

I read a bit more of ألف ليلة وليلة, plus نابینا شہر میں آئینہ, Quechua Cusqueño, കടലാസുപൂക്കൾ, Practical Chinese Reader V, 经商宝典, Teach Yourself Ancient Greek, the introduction to Ourika, and more from Querschnitt. Next, I'll probably read another Uncle Scrooge story in German.

[linguoboy]

A friend wanted to read Amos Tutuola's The palm-wine drinkard so I got an omnibus edition of that plus his My life in the bush of ghosts. I've finished the latter and I'm about halfway through the former. They're very similar, both about extraordinary individuals who make picaresque journeys through fantastical landscapes populated by supernatural creatures. I thought the episodic nature of the tales would make them tedious, but I actually read Bush of ghosts pretty rapidly, at least until I got to the final stretch. I'm having a little more trouble with Drinkard, I'm not sure why. Maybe because it feels like there are more dei ex machina, which saps some of the tension. (The protagonist of Bush of ghosts is an ordinary child when he crosses into the underworld whereas the eponymous drinkard refers to himself as "Father of gods who could do anything in this world" and he's constantly like "then I remembered I had a juju which allowed me to turn into a bird so I did that".)

[Yasna]

A friend wanted to read Amos Tutuola's The palm-wine drinkard so I got an omnibus edition of that plus his My life in the bush of ghosts. I've finished the latter and I'm about halfway through the former. They're very similar, both about extraordinary individuals who make picaresque journeys through fantastical landscapes populated by supernatural creatures. I thought the episodic nature of the tales would make them tedious, but I actually read Bush of ghosts pretty rapidly, at least until I got to the final stretch. I'm having a little more trouble with Drinkard, I'm not sure why. Maybe because it feels like there are more dei ex machina, which saps some of the tension. (The protagonist of Bush of ghosts is an ordinary child when he crosses into the underworld whereas the eponymous drinkard refers to himself as "Father of gods who could do anything in this world" and he's constantly like "then I remembered I had a juju which allowed me to turn into a bird so I did that".)

The Wikipedia article for Amos Tutuola mentions his use of "broken English" and "atypical language". I'm not sure what to make of that. Is Nigerian Pidgin used in some of the dialogues or what?

[linguoboy]

The Wikipedia article for Amos Tutuola mentions his use of "broken English" and "atypical language". I'm not sure what to make of that. Is Nigerian Pidgin used in some of the dialogues or what?

There's nothing in the dialogues (of which there aren't many--both books have first-person narrators who summarise most interactions) that I would consider even acrolectal pidgin. Tutuola simply has some usages which would be considered "mistakes" from the perspective of an average North American or British English instructor. A minor but frequent example is his use of "immediately" to mean "immediately after" or "once", e.g.:

"Immediately I had taken the cola, we kept going..."
"Immediately I got out from the room they told me to sit down in their middle as they sat down in a circle..."
"But immediately I started to count them these three ghosts shone the three kinds of light on my body at the same time..."

It's jarring the first couple of times you encountre it--you feel like the copyeditor missed something--but you soon figure out it's just a quirk of his prose and after a while it hardly registers. I have no idea if this is common colloquial usage in Nigerian English, a feature of a particular variety (such as the dialect of Lagos or of L1 speakers of Yoruba), or even if this is an idiosyncrasy unique to Tutuola himself. From the point of view of comprehending the story, it hardly matters.

[vijayjohn]

Yeah, I looked it up and took a look at the first few pages of this book on Amazon, and I think they just mean people think his English is ungrammatical. I think on the first page he writes "by that" when he means 'because of that', and he also writes things like "I spent about eight hours to reach there" rather than "I took about eight hours to get there." The differences between his English and, say, American English look completely trivial compared to much of what I've read in Indian English. So far, his English doesn't strike me as particularly strange or different at all.

I read an Uncle Scrooge story and a Donald Duck story in German. I think I'll read the next chapter of A Ditadura Envergonhada next. I don't think I can come up with a better translation of that title into English than 'The Dictatorship That Was Ashamed Of Itself', however wordy that may seem.

[azhong]

...and he also writes things like "I spent about eight hours to reach there" rather than "I took about eight hours to get there".

To make sure, I think sentences that are grammatical should perhaps be
I spend hours... or
It takes me hours , whereas I take hours sounds ungrammatical to me. Am I wrong?

Also, I feel linguoboy seems not to recommend the two books.

[vijayjohn]

...and he also writes things like "I spent about eight hours to reach there" rather than "I took about eight hours to get there".

To make sure, I think sentences that are grammatical should perhaps be
I spend hours... or
It takes me hours , whereas I take hours sounds ungrammatical to me. Am I wrong?

Yes, I would say you are wrong. In fact, I get the impression that Americans are more likely to say both it takes me hours and I take hours than I spend hours.

Also, I feel linguoboy seems not to recommend the two books.

What makes you think so? I didn't get that impression at all.

[Yasna]

There's nothing in the dialogues (of which there aren't many--both books have first-person narrators who summarise most interactions) that I would consider even acrolectal pidgin. [...]

It's jarring the first couple of times you encountre it--you feel like the copyeditor missed something--but you soon figure out it's just a quirk of his prose and after a while it hardly registers. I have no idea if this is common colloquial usage in Nigerian English, a feature of a particular variety (such as the dialect of Lagos or of L1 speakers of Yoruba), or even if this is an idiosyncrasy unique to Tutuola himself. From the point of view of comprehending the story, it hardly matters.

Ah, ok. Seems like the sort of thing only a prescriptivist would take issue with.

[linguoboy]

Ah, ok. Seems like the sort of thing only a prescriptivist would take issue with.

It also seems somewhat a product of the attitudes of the time. In 1952, it was still probably fairly revolutionary to present prose in published works that wasn't 100% Queen's English. I can't remember who came up with the concept of "language hygiene" but I think it's a useful concept. 60 years ago, most of the prose people were reading was highly intermediated. Even the text of speeches and quotes was often thoroughly cleaned up before being published in newspapers or other media. Nowadays it's a completely different environment, with most people probably reading more texts, tweets, posts, memes, blogs, automatically-generated captions, etc. than formally published content, and even in publishing the mediation has been reduced. Diglossia in English was never as pronounced as for other languages, and now it's likely the least it's ever been, so prose that cleaves closely to a given individual's idiolect just isn't that remarkable.

[vijayjohn]

I'm reading the second chapter of A Ditadura Envergonhada. It's very long and also has several pages of pictures with captions. I'm gonna be stuck reading this for a long time!

[Osias]

I think the pages with pictures with shorten the time needed, no? Also: what time period that chapter covers?

[vijayjohn]

I think the pages with pictures with shorten the time needed, no?

Not really because I want to read all the captions for the pictures, too. The chapter is very long even without them.

Also: what time period that chapter covers?

I would say what time period does that chapter cover?

This book is so detailed I'm getting very lost, but I think it's about the coup (a coup? I'm not even sure just how many coups this book is covering ). Apparently, that would be April 1, 1964, but just to show you how confused I am, I keep seeing the year 1988 being mentioned so much for some unknown reason that I thought it was April 1, 1988.

To be fair, almost every book I'm reading at this point is so detailed that I'm getting very lost.

[Osias]

There was a single coup in April 1, 1964. In 1988 the new democratic constitution was promulgated. It's the current one. So these two years mark the lower and upper bounds of this book.

I thought each chapter would cover some years, like the first one being about 64, the second one the next 2 or 3 years or something. That was what I was asking: what is chapter 2 covering?

I think you're getting lost by not being familiar with Brazilian history details. When the guy says '1988' he probably means 'when the period of this book was over', a metonymy (or something). There are probably many other things like that. In English I sometimes stumble upon 'DC' referring to Washington DC and actually meaning the US government. It takes me some seconds to realize it's not DC Comics. There probably are references to "o planalto" because Brasília is located on something called "Planalto Central".

PS: it's strange for me to consider 'history' things I saw live on TV in the 80s.

[vijayjohn]

I thought each chapter would cover some years, like the first one being about 64, the second one the next 2 or 3 years or something. That was what I was asking: what is chapter 2 covering?

I think Chapter 1 is covering the years before the coup and Chapter 2 is covering the coup itself? I'm not sure. I've read about ten pages of Chapter 2, and so far, they seem to just be talking about the coup.

I think you're getting lost by not being familiar with Brazilian history details.

I'm definitely getting lost by not being familiar with Brazilian history at all, but it's even worse than that, because I'm barely even paying attention to what I'm reading!

PS: it's strange for me to consider 'history' things I saw live on TV in the 80s.

Yeah, I kind of feel this way about a lot of things these days. On the Internet, for me, that's mainly a problem with the Iraq War. I always have to remember that people are younger than me and weren't old enough to understand what happened at that time. I think I've always been particularly emotional about that war.