Twain’s lingo
Twain’s A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I
heard it is written in a style described best by its title. The words “as I heard it,” from the title, do
a great job expressing the phonetic style in which Twain is able to write the
dialogue between the characters Aunt Rachel and Mr. C.
Having the
benefit of also having read the articles on AAVE, I can identify many aspects
of Aunt Rachel’s speech relating to AAVE: dropping consonants at the end of
words, changing the “th” sound to the “d” sound or the “f” sound, and omitting
some of the forms of “to be.” Compared
to the parlance of modern day AAVE, Twain reveals some linguistic differences
in Aunt Rachel’s speech such as the run-on sentence structure that, along with
historical references to slavery, provides some indication that her character may
not be familiar with written English. Yet the syntax of her speech reveals it to be
a dialect of English; her sentence structure follows the same subject verb
agreement as standard, American English.
I had to
read Twain’s story a few times to get a good sense of the meaning of most of
Aunt Rachel’s words, and there are still some words that I am not sure of.
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