Young Writers Society

I have my conversations, I've transcribed them into text, but I'm now stuck.

For my coursework I'm doing about German and English, and I'm trying to write in the german's accents and the americanised inflections that they had in thier speech, but I don't know how to write this on to paper. At the moment I'm toying with the idea of using crescendo-like signs for the inflections, but I've no idea as to how I could do the accent.

Eye-dialect doesn't work 'cause they all speak pretty RP English, but there's a definate accent there, I'm just not sure how to get it across

Any link or help or anything would be wonderful, my teacher's off sick so I can't ask her for a while.

Well I don't know what Eye-dialect is but why not just use phonetic spelling? I always find that the easiest way to convey a character's accent. For German, they tend to pronounce their w's as v's and their k's as c's and such. Does that help at all?

There are times when people speaking a second language, you can't describe phonetically what sounds they're making as easily as you can describe how their voice in general sounds. For example, the word "you" is very easily to slew into a whole range of pronunciations, but spelling it any different than YOU would become messy after a while (think: Huck Finn accents) so instead you could describe the person's voice, how one person might say it as "yew", another might say it like with their tongue clogged in the back of their throat, one with their mouth open very wide, one with their jaw clamped together, one that rolls their tongue so that the Y sound becomes more of a SCH sound (further linguistics-ish type things could be helpful here: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... n%26sa%3DN)

And maybe you wouldn't want to describe how everyone's mouth moves while saying these things, but keeping the general information in the back of your head might be helpful in the long run. Back to what I was saying earlier, (and to answer your question in an unfortunately roundabout way) try broadening the scope of your descriptions to include not just phonetic differences, but general voice differences as well.

Hope this helps; PM me if I didn't make any sense, lol
-Amelia

Would Eye-dialect be anything like the symbols used to show word pronunciation and spelling? What I'm talking about is basically what Ameliais saying, except there are specific symbols used for each language, for example, in Australian English the symbol used for the 'OU' sound in 'house' might be different for that of Americans.

I am not sure if I'm talking about the right thing, i.e dipthongs, monothongs, vowel sounds and the like, but that seems to be what you're talking about. The symbols arent hard to find, all on the net somewhere; the site Amelia gave is a good begining.

I hope that helps, feel free to pm me if you need further clarification - though my study is for English and I think I'm failing it >.<


*hearts* Le Penguin.

I guess I should have explained what eye-dialect is XD it's pretty much just spelling things pheonetically, using non-standard spelling to get across a non-standard pronunciation, normally a regional dialect. I've just had all the terminology drilled into me >.>

Kitty: There were a few cases where there were vs instead of ws, but thier english pronunciation was really good, better than some english people's, like my sister, who I recorded with them.

Amelia: Thank you for the link, it looks like it's the sort of thing I'm looking ofr, I'll have a closer read through, and hopefully check with my teacher if it's the right thing when I get back ^^ And what you said did make a lot of sense, thank you again.

Penguinattack: I think you're right about me needing the symbols, unfortunatly in my class we haven't done a lot in depth on pronunciation and that side of linguistics XD I think that they'd be pretty similar though, I'll have a check ^^