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Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 3:54 am
In order to ease understanding, it's not uncommon to cut off accents in dialogue. For example, Trotsky-bot Snowball's dialogue is written like this: Quote: “Space Corps ships would have to have given identification by now, I’m afraid. We have a blip, it’s hostile, and we have no weapons. I don’t know about you, but I think this is going to be a really fascinating encounter.” But it really sounds like this: Quote: “Space Cohrps ships vould have to have given identification by now, Ai’m arfraid. Uie harve blip, it’s hohstile, and uie harving no weapons. Ai don’t know about you, but Ai am sinking zis is going to be really farscinating encounter.” A little hard to read, but you get the idea. His Russian accent chip sure ain't down yet. So! The point of this is, if your characters have a different or interesting accent that you usually don't type out, for stylistic or understanding reasons, go for it here! Everyone talks differently - it's worth examining. Also, if they have a phrase or word they use frequently, you might wahnt (oh, now look. I'm typing in a russian accent) to tack that on the end. It might be advisable to supply the un-accented text, especially if it's hard to read like Snowball's. And to make this more fun... maybe find a delicate solilique and give it the worst French accent you can type. Or butcher your scene with a terrible German accent. Quote: “Here-a yuoo hefe-a stoombled ecruss zee prublem. Zeere-a shuoold be-a nu oone-a oooot here-a, zee Spece-a Curps furbeeds it. Thees meuns thet vhetefer oooor bleep is, it hesn’t gut a permeet." “Mein gott! Und it is dangeros!?” gasped Angie, reaching for the controls.
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Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:28 am
*comes after Oolie in the dead of night with a butcher knife for having improperly displayed an inaccurate German accent* D:<
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Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:20 pm
Hey, do you have any idea of my experience of accents? I knew one Russian girl, several Indonesians and one Chinese girl. As 'multicultural' as people claim Australia is, there really aren't a lot of Germans.
Care to repair it?
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Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 9:33 pm
Leon's supposed to have a Polish-y accent, but I just muddle up his grammar. He's not that great at pronouns (he gets "he" "she" and "I," but doesn't have much a conception of "they" or "us"), and his vocabulary isn't the best. Also, when he explains things, he doesn't quite have the English sense of past tense down, so he tells the story as if it were in a very confused present tense. None of this has any bearing on real-life Polish, but his native language is technically Serorian and made-up so I can get away with pulling this stuff out of my a**. Right? Right.
Drek was originally supposed to have a stereotypical Germanish accent, but now it's a little more Italian. He likes to show off the vague English he knows (kind of like the English-speakers who are always wanting to show off the Japanese words they know and go around spouting "kawaii desu!") and usually ends up repeating things and confusing himself. He likes the word "indeed" and abuses it to no end.
But all I'm familiar with outside of English is messy Latin and weak Polish, so I'm not really going to try and turn phrases into accents I don't have any clue of the syntax of. My biggest thing, since my characters' languages are non-existent, is simply keeping up with the way I mess up their grammar.
And I don't quite get adding "a" to the end of your words in the Germanization up there, as that's usual a stereotypical Italian thing to do. [ edit ] orwait, were you going for Swedish?
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Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 12:50 am
I think she was going for French, actually, but the last line was butchered German.
Each of my characters has a slightly different way of speaking, but I wouldn't say any of them have a definite accent. Though I have always imagined Yinda slipping into a sort of Cockney-Tennessee hybrid around her fellow ruffians.
Richard, minor character that he is, has a Northern accent, which I can't exactly name a parallel to. Essentially, all "hard" consonants (such as T and D) are softened into a sort of th or dh. In the case of both sounds, the tongue is placed at the very base of the front teeth, as opposed to further back on the hard palatte, the resulting sound being more or less just this side of a lisp. Cover this with a thin coat of British accent for flavor, bake at 300 degrees for 20 minutes, and serve hot.
In other words, thisQuote: "I knew you'd understand." Would sound something like thisQuote: "I kneew you dhundhusdhandh." His lips and jaw don't move much when he speaks, either. And just imagine the trouble he'd have saying a name like Nathaniel Eya Landsman Kamatari. It would probably come out as "Nadhaniel Eya Lanthsman Khamadhari" with a rolled R.
In fact, Vayne at the very beginning of FFXII had almost a perfect Richard accent. But then he lost it by the next time he showed up.
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Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:27 am
How on Earth do you understand a Northerner? o_O
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Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 2:25 am
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Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 10:44 pm
It's a much more subtle accent than it looks like in writing. sweatdrop I'm getting better at imitating it myself. It's basically just hoity-toity British-y with no harsh consonants. Though I imagine phrases like "don't let it interfere" would be very hard to understand.
And thank God I don't actually write Richard's dialect in the story.
Edit: Big oops I made with this dialect: Northern's official name is Tulane. Therefore they must pronounce their country's name "Dhoo-len."
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Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 3:36 am
Hmm, you reminded me of the Adris accent then. It's only written into the story once - the 'they have fish in their ears' style translator plot event evens it out after that. But this is one of them trying to speak English: Quote: “Won’t git ‘ound, ah? Ti bovarna stipides! Ay git to tribal ov learnit ti stipiden languich, ta steel di not undistant!” And this is what he was trying to say: Quote: "You won't turn around, then? You are very stupid! I go to all the trouble of learning this stupid language, and you still don't understand!" He also has this little... err... mistranslation: Quote: “Git semit-daydos, rid-hird dig!” Which is actually "Go unconcious, red-haired dog". He decided to call it "semi-dead" instead.
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Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 2:12 pm
Wow.... Now, some of my characters do have accents, but I have no idea how to write them out. xd That's why I don't write them out, other than the fact that it's just an eyesore and it slows down the reading, especially for the main character.
Niklaus has a very heavy German accent. It completely butchers his English so much that it sounds like he's speaking German anyway even when he's speaking English [like the father of one of my friends. rofl ]. And this is the one that I'm not even going to lay a finger on because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing and I'm going to get all the Germans on me. gonk That's why his English seems amazingly fluent for a native German ... when it really, really isn't. *shot*
Brad has a Texan accent. And it might sound stereotypical, but he does say "y'all". I'm probably going to completely butcher his accent as well, so I'm really afraid to try and write it out...
Quote: "Well, ma'am, Ah don't really got nothin' wit' me ... Ah didn' really know that y'all were settin' up a s'prise date..... Well, Ah guess tha'll make sense, sance it's a s'prise an' all..."
Not a real quote, it sucks and rambles, but I had to write something. *shot* And any Texans/Southerners here, please forgive my horrible attempt at imitating your accent. DX
And then, I always have dear Ralphie. He has a 'Standard' English accent, if you will. I don't really know what that sounds like either, even though I watch BBC every day. But I'll try it anyway. xd
Quote: Wot d'you mayn, there's no teah? Oi had ah whole stash of it! You drank it all, didn't you, chav?
Yeeaaaaaaaaah... another horrible attempt at an accent that I have no idea how to imitate.
Sorry for any eyes/brains/anything else that I might have burned with my horrible attempts. xd Now you all know why I don't incorporate accents into my story ... to spare people the pain of reading them and having their heads implode with the horribleness. *shot*
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Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 9:23 pm
That sounds like a good reason for me to take for not writing accents, given the responses of these two.
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 6:23 pm
*roffle* I sometimes have a Southern accent. I'll say ya'll, have a drawl, and the heavier it gets the more incomprehensible it gets. xD It's hard to write. Go to Georgia and mix it with Northern Virginia. INSTA-VENUS. xd
Isaac's one of the only characters I see with an accent... and he sounds like a stereotypical angry Scotsman. biggrin
Drazora just sounds like he's from Japan. xp Which doesn't fit at all, because I know he can hear the difference between l and r. sweatdrop
Don't ask me to type the accents. I'm really bad with them, and I've only heard them a few times, so I can't transfer it to written words.
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 6:36 pm
Heh, I've been teaching myself Japanese, and I only recently got the l-r thing down. They know the difference, it's just that they don't have an 'l'sound, and their 'r' sound is half-way between the two. It's actually a really awesome sound. And it makes it sooooo much easier to speak Japanese, too...
Still got a long way before I get the s-z sound normal. I used to think senbon and zenbon were different things. confused
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 7:05 pm
True, but the brain is built in such a way that, after a certian point, it can no longer "hear" the difference. So I call it the lr sound. 3nodding
...Yeah, I know. Logic stream makes no sense.
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Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 7:25 pm
If you do it for a long time, it sounds like "lurrrrrrr", so I call it the 'lur' sound. Makes even less sense.
The lur sound and the szszz sound. I make so much sense when I talk about languages! And let's not forget "those sounds you kind of make with your nose"- yes, that is a real quote. gonk
It annoys me a ton when anime characters just decide to take their own liberties with the language. Especially a certain black-haired firgid a** from Bleach. And the dialects make me cry.
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