I finished reading Mary Francis's In a north country village a while ago and after short holdup after the Librivox server migration, it is now online and available for download via the audioboowks page. This was my first dip of the toes into dialect reading and by and large I think I have survived. Right now, though, I am taking a step back and reading Wordsworth's River Duddon sonnets, which is a different kind of challenge as I have never really got the point of Wordsworth. It is fun, nevertheless to read a series of poems that takes you down a river from its source to the sea.
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With F. A. Bruton's Lancashire now behind me, I have embarked on reading M. E. Francis' In a North Country Village as my next LibriVox read. Apart from it being a book that it is well worth reading the logic behind this is simply that the dialect passages are relatively light and not too difficult to get my tongue around. It is impossible, in fact, to read 19th century Lancashire fiction aloud without engaging with the dialect, which can at times be impenetrable to an outsider - which nowadays means more or less everybody, Lancashire folk included, as the 19th century forms of the various dialects have now died out. Who nowadays, for example, would answer a polite inquiry as to whether it had been raining with, "Nobbut a spot or two, and we'st ha' no moor while the wind's in yon quarter'?
There are basically two kinds of dialect writing, one where the text is entirely written in dialect and one where it is mainly in the spoken passages. M. E Francis' writing is of the second kind. Having grown up in Manchester, some Lancashire pronunciations do not trip easily off my tongue, and anyone who cares to listen will here me struggling to say 'old' as 'owd', 'home' as 'whoam', and to manage 'running t' th' gate' with a soft 'th' and without enunciating the vowels in 'to' and 'the'. It is not so much the pronunciation that is difficult as making it all flow. Perhaps I should get myself a dialect coach, but until I do I must thank Philip Dunkerley for his excellent pages on Lancashire dialect and especially for his mp3 recordings of Lancashire poetry, which have been the greatest of help. I have also come up with two rules - I don't know if others would agree. (1) Read what is written on the page, even if it appears to be inconsistent or wrong. This is reading aloud, after all, and it is not for me to correct authors if I think they have their dialect wrong. (2) Concentrate on the flow of the words and don't worry too much if listeners will understand the dialect or not. After all, these books were written to be read and if the authors thought they would be understood, who am I to differ? |
Phil Benson
Born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, which it still is really. Exiled in sunny Sydney, I love to read Lancashire books Archives
March 2013
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