Not that I expect he'll see this

[redbird]

Memo to Ken MacLeod: I am discovering that my ear for Glaswegian is better than my eye for it.

Comments

[pnh.livejournal.com]

You mean, you can make it out as spoken language better than you can read transcripts of the dialect?

And if so, which MacLeod work are you referring to?

[redbird]

Yes; Newton's Wake (which I am about 2/3 of the way through).

[pnh.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, Ken is about as Glaswegian as I am. He was born and raised on Lewis, and lives in Edinburgh.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

But the characters in NW are Glaswegian.

I had some trouble with reading the dialogue too, and while I have no ear for Glaswegian at all, I can generally manage other dialects.

I was once in the position of needing to help translate to and fro Greek to French. The Greek bus driver spoke Greek, I translated to English, a French-speaking Glaswegian translated to French. The French border guard listened, replied in French, the Glaswegian translated to Glaswegian, his wife -- from elsewhere in Scotland -- repeated it to me in English, and I translated it to Greek. Oh dear.

[carandol.livejournal.com]

I find, in cases like that, that reading the book aloud to myself gets me into the dialect better.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

That trick also works, to some extent, with Finnegans Wake.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read Fearsum Endjinn?

[carandol.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's the book that I was thinking of, but I'd forgotten what it was called.