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TheStrayCat wrote:I finished... The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King.
azhong wrote: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.
azhong wrote: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?
TheStrayCat wrote:azhong wrote: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.
linguoboy wrote: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 wrote: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?
...and he also writes things like "I spent about eight hours to reach there" rather than "I took about eight hours to get there".
azhong wrote:...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.
linguoboy wrote: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.
Yasna wrote:Ah, ok. Seems like the sort of thing only a prescriptivist would take issue with.
Osias wrote:I think the pages with pictures with shorten the time needed, no?
Also: what time period that chapter covers?
Osias wrote: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.
PS: it's strange for me to consider 'history' things I saw live on TV in the 80s.
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