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linguoboy wrote:He likes short sentences.
Short, dramatic sentences.
I think you know the kind I'm talking about.
linguoboy wrote:At the other extreme is Un nos ola leuad. It's a much better book but my progress is s o s l o o o o o w. It is frustrating that I don't have a better handle on the language by now. I really need to commit to reading a bit every day because when I skip several days in a row I find myself looking up basic vocabulary that I really should have a firm grasp of by now.
Yasna wrote:"This community traditionally portrayed as [-] hard-working, devout, [of] cultured and politically aware quarrymen, belonging to a whole community of like-minded people was a potent myth of the Welsh-Nonconformist-Radical tradition [-] in Prichard's novel the local pub seems more the focus of village life, and in place of the dignity and stoicism portrayed in the Roberts/Rowland Hughes world [-] here people crack and go under with the strain, commit suicide and go insane [-] religion is not an anchor, but an obsession, gossip and superstition, not political ideas are exchanged on the streets."
Synalepha wrote:- Always Coming Home (U. K. Le Guin): the novel is great, the short stories are ok, the poems and the ethnography part oh dear God kill me please.
Synalepha wrote:- The Dunwhich Horror (H. P. Lovecraft): it's the latest I've read among his stories. I love Lovecraft's baroque, highfaluting prose and the imagery that he's capable to conjure up. However I can't stand it when he writes dialogues in a non-standard English (I also wonder if there's an element of classism in that, which I'm not picking up on as an L2 speaker).
linguoboy wrote:Possibly, but it's something that was common to the period. If you pick up any volume of popular fiction from the 20s, you're likely to find a lot of eye-dialect in it.
Synalepha wrote:*Thanks, didn't know the word
Synalepha wrote:What is it like reading those as a native speaker? Are they annoying, do they slow down the flow of the text?
linguoboy wrote:Mark Twain was also noted for his widespread use of dialect spellings when representing speech and I didn't find this interrupted with the flow of the text at all.
Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:Mark Twain was also noted for his widespread use of dialect spellings when representing speech and I didn't find this interrupted with the flow of the text at all.
Twain's use of dialect spellings definitely slows me down. Perhaps being from the Midwest helps with Twain, at least his novels that take place along the Mississippi?
Synalepha wrote:What is it like reading those as a native speaker? Are they annoying, do they slow down the flow of the text?
Linguaphile wrote:I imagine the same would be true for anyone for whom English is a second language if they don't have an advanced vocabulary yet.
linguoboy wrote:At the other extreme is Un nos ola leuad. It's a much better book but my progress is s o s l o o o o o w. It is frustrating that I don't have a better handle on the language by now. I really need to commit to reading a bit every day because when I skip several days in a row I find myself looking up basic vocabulary that I really should have a firm grasp of by now.
And you're really thrown in medias res. The narrator is a ten-year old boy, who just starts talking about all the local people as if the listener already knows them and is just fuzzy on some details. That's one reason why I thought it would get easier as I went along and I no longer had to struggle to figure out who everyone was.
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