Jody said,”You shore kin figger what a creetur’ll do.”
“You belong to figger. A wild creetur’s quicker’n a man and a heap stronger. What’s a man got that a bear ain’t got? A mite more sense. He can’t out-run a bear, but he’s a sorry hunter if he can’t out-study him.”
This is an excerpt from Marjorie Kinnen Rawlings, The Yearling. Here Jody and his father Penny are beginning their hunt for “Slew Foot”, an old black bear who just killed their family sow.
This month I begin with this dialogue from The Yearling as an example of a great writer’s attention to dialect. In this case a family living inland Florida in the 1870s. Rawling’s attention to detail allows the words of her story to acquire depth. The dialect is a colorful map to Jody’s time and location in Floridy. (Penny’s call for Florida.)
Huckleberry Finn, in page three of the Author notes, Mark Twain summarizes the dialects used; the Missouri negro dialect & 4 modified varieties of this county dialects-“Pike County.”
“Each character has their own personal variation of regional Mississippi dialects.”
HuckFinn “Pap warn’t in a good humor so he was his natural self.” (Twain, 26)
Jim Most unique dialect in the novel. “She never done it. Jis’ stood dah, kiner smilin up at me.” (Twain, 142)
Ian Sass, on Prezi, continues by explaining that dialect is used to express solidarity and effective meaning related to what part of the country people come from.
Continuing with another of my favorite authors, Dickens: In a study guide by Michael J. Cummings, he explains, “Dickens: alters speech patterns and vocabulary to reflect their personalities, their social class, or the dialect spoken.”
All great writers from Plato, Shakespeare, Goethe,Tarkington, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wilde and countless others translate their genius for detail by writing dialects that bring life to their characters.
Our geographical imprinted locations very much carry forth to this moment. I announce the location of my birth and upbringing every time “I pahk my cah in Havard Yahd.”
I believe that we (man) will always be able to verbalize a belief. But (man) will not always be able to verbalize a soul understanding. Communication, verbal and written, is linear (narrow). Narrow as all the words written and verbalized are though, they’re still over 6500 languages spoken. The New York Times reports ” When scholars in Germany started working on the most comprehensive Latin Dictionary ever, they thought it would take 15 to 20 years. That was 125 years ago. They’re up to the letter R. Entitled the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, it is now hoped to be finished by 2050.
A lot of words, a lot of dialects, a lot of languages and still we can’t seem to find the right word. What do we have to do to broaden our intuition and our communication with our self and each other?
What is my Lighthouse this month? Of course for me it is a symbol of understanding light, bringing me home.
In A Dictionary of Symbols, Senor Cirlot introduces us to the following concept: “Man it has been said is a symbolizing animal; it is evident that at no stage in the development of civilization has man been able to dispense with symbols. Science and technology has not freed man from his dependence on symbols: indeed it might be argued that they have increased his need for them.”
In the next few months I will attempt to explore the “language” of symbols to help ” light” my way on my journey. If you decide to follow along I thank you for your company and as always I thank you for reading!
Mark