Dialects in Perspective

· Is dialect a help or a hindrance? What resources does it make available for scene setting and characterization? Does it enlarge or restrict one's vocabulary?

A dialect helps you most of the time, because in any case that you are trying describe a place or a person it would give us a larger idea of how they are and a way of understanding them. I guess that when you are describing something or someone, we use some words in particular that can’t be translated to explain their meaning but for the people that understand them it gives them a bigger image of what they are trying to imagine. This may enlarge your vocabulary because you are learning new ways to express feelings or describe things.

· How does dialect influence plot development and narration? Does it limit one to the "and then, and then" connection of incident to incident typical of oral storytelling? Does it open opportunities for sliding easily off on a tangent?

With experiences you have in your life your vocabulary starts to expand and by enlarging that vocabulary, you will be able to explain, narrate or describe things more profoundly. It does not limit the connection of incident to incident it actually enriches the oral storytelling because they are connected and make sense. Depending of the situation the sliding gives and doesn´t gives opportunities, you don’t have to actually “speak” the dialect to slide off the tangent.

· Comment on Twain's use of dialect, what goes into the dialect he creates—misspellings? grammatical mistakes? inventive punctuation? loose sentence structure? colloquial turns of phrase? Have students point out examples of each of these stylistic tricks and describe the tricks they used to create a dialect effect.

He uses all these types of “errors” to give us a bigger idea of how the characters are, if they are gentle, aggressive, and I think the way you read the word for example, “An’t/ain’t” gives us a way of how they talk.

Mark Twain uses misspellings, grammatical mistakes, inventive punctuation, loose sentence structure and colloquial turns in “the jumping frog” such as:

•        Any thing/ anything
•        Solittry/ solitary
•        Wan’s/ want’s
•        Underjaw’d / underjaw
•        Jest / just
•        Back yard / backyard
•        Edercate / educate
•        Cal'klated / calculated
•        May be/ maybe
•        An’t/ain’t
•        Tom-cats/ tomcats
•        Sur-prised/surprised
•       Hisself/ himself
•     "Why, blame my cats, if he don't weigh five pound!"
•        It always makes me feel sorry when I think of that last fight of his'n, and the way it turned out.
•    ...he never done nothing for three months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump.
•     "H'm so 'tis. Well, what's he good for?"