Awn Die-uh-log

[gaudior]

Soe sumwun awn uh blawg Ai wuz reading wuz tawking uhbaowt haow uhnoying it iz when writ'rs spell aowt thuh speech uv peepull uv uther backrownds tuh show diffrence.* End haow distuncing it iz fer peepul uv thuh backround being purtrayed. End haow if ennee-wun'z die-uh-log wuz writt'n aowt that way it wouhd look uhbsurd.

Whut d'yoo gaiz think?

--Arr.


Thuh Hip-Hop Nurd sed, here: As a sort of aside, I truly hate it when Black characters or any characters of color have their dialogue spelled out phonetically by White authors. It immediately creates a divide by making their dialogue difficult to understand at a glance. In fact, I'm sure if anyone's dialogue was written out phonetically it would look absurd.

Comments

[pastwatcher]

Exactly: I was going to say that if one was planning to do this, one ought to use IPA.

[badoingdoing.livejournal.com]

Reading such a novel would also be the best way I can think of to become fluent in reading IPA. Because it's *just* close enough to English that you can start out by faking it, and you can get better at it as you go on.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Copy editing it could be a real pain, though. You might need to supply two or three copies of the dialog, one with the IPA for publication and one with the dialog in normal English (and one with approximate phonetics indicated in English?), where a linguist/phoneticist makes sure the publication copy is consistent and reasonably matches up with the internal-for-review translations, and the copy-editor could maybe then mostly ignore the phonetics.