A Match for Sister Maggy has a written accent. (Ach, wee, dinna!) La Neels does a fair job at making Maggy clearly Scots but her accent not too terribly broad. But this puts me in mind of all the other books I've read wherein the author's devotion to authenticity was not sacrificed one whit on the alter of readability.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was wonderfully done (accent-wise) but I did have some trouble with certain passages and had to go over them by sounding them out.
The worst for me is Grace Livingston Hill. Italians, nefarious Germans (is there any other kind?) and Irish cops get the worst treatment but at least they tend to be peripheral characters. My all time most hated GLH is Miranda--where the main character is a lower-class serving girl. We follow Miranda's travails for twenty years all is an awful, unreadable accent.
My question is: What are some of your funner Adventures in Accent Reading?
My favorite book of all time is a dirty romance by Johanna Lindsay. In it the hero is a Scotish Laird and is saved from prison by his brogue.
ReplyDeleteI love Scottish lairds--dirty or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI think linguists have identified 16 separate regional dialects accurately utilized by Twain in Huckleberry Finn--and you thought he was just an old crank.
ReplyDeleteLorraine Snelling (sp?) has written a series of Christian novels about the Norwegian peoples who settled the Red River Valley in North Dakota. My son married a girl of Norwegian descent last year and my sister and I, who'd read the novels and picked up one of their most-used phrases "Uff Da!" as one of our new "exclamations," were a bit embarrassed to learn we'd been saying it incorrectly! We were' saying "OOF..DA," with equal emphasis on both parts. But alas, we learned from my son's new family that it's really "OOFda." :) Emphasis on the first syllable and with no noticeable pause between.
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