linguoboy wrote:Do you have a favourite African-American fiction author?
I think she's the only one I've read.
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linguoboy wrote:Do you have a favourite African-American fiction author?
Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:Do you have a favourite African-American fiction author?
I think she's the only one I've read.
vijayjohn wrote:Yasna wrote:linguoboy wrote:Do you have a favourite African-American fiction author?
I think she's the only one I've read.
Didn't you read any at any point in school? The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines? "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker? Virginia Hamilton? Zora Neale Hurston?
vijayjohn wrote:Didn't you read any at any point in school? The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines? "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker? Virginia Hamilton? Zora Neale Hurston?
Yasna wrote:vijayjohn wrote:Didn't you read any at any point in school? The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines? "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker? Virginia Hamilton? Zora Neale Hurston?
None of those ring a bell, but it's possible we read some short story that just didn't stick with me.
linguoboy wrote:Last night during a bout of insomnia, I went to my old To-Read shelf, took down Hardy's The Mayor of Castlebridge, and flipped to a random page. It just so happened to be a discussion of one character's attempts to wean herself off the local dialect and two of the expressions she had successfully managed to stop using were "dumbledore" and "hag-rid".
I'm not sure what to do with this information.
This article says:
Rowling explicitly noted in interview (in 2000) that Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge was the source for Dumbledore’s name. It is a traditional Dorset name for bumblebee and she has noted that she chose it because he is a musical person and she imagined him humming to himself all the time (like a bee’s buzzing!): ‘I chose it because my image is of this benign wizard, always on the move, humming to himself’ (Rowling, 2002). There is also the sound of the word: Dumbledore’s name is another example of Rowling’s excellence at cratylic naming. The sound of the name evokes a friendly dependability – the repeated ‘d’ sounds solid and reliable, the soft ‘um’ sounds warm – and it ‘sounds endearing and strangely impressive at the same time’ (Rowling, 2002). She first came across the word by reading this passage in Hardy, in which Elizabeth-Jane has to ‘unlearn’ her native dialect in order to please her new father and appear more genteel:
One grievous failing of Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect words–those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel… in time it came to pass … that she no longer spoke of ‘dumbledores’ but of ‘humble bees’… that when she had not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she had been ‘hag-rid,’ but that she had ‘suffered from indigestion.
As you can see Hagrid’s name turns up here too – it feels like a little gift left unmentioned by Rowling for those who choose to retrace her steps! I think this source also gives these names a more important significance than simply their sound and sense. Rowling’s Wizarding world, the world of Hagrid and Dumbledore, is being identified here with a native dialect. Elizabeth-Jane’s childhood, her authentic self and these names therefore connect the Wizarding World with something of this native, imaginative space, free from the repressive strictures of the Henchards and Dursley’s of this world (both ‘adoptive’ families in which the hero/heroine find themselves are obsessed with and deeply stressed by keeping up appearances; and hence try and stamp out the protagonist’s true nature.)
Yasna wrote:What kind of cavalier disregard for accuracy does it take to make such a publishing decision when there is no doubt an adequate supply of Chinese>Japanese translators.
vijayjohn wrote:maybe the Japanese felt that translating directly from Chinese was a mistake that would affect sales badly
Osias wrote:vijayjohn wrote:maybe the Japanese felt that translating directly from Chinese was a mistake that would affect sales badly
I think this is a weird thing for the Japanese to think. It verges on superstition. But I don't think Linguoboy would suggest that out of the blue, there must be copious examples of things like that working out in the market.
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