- Joined
- Dec 31, 2015
- Messages
- 118
- Reaction score
- 13
Sorry. Can’t take anyone who claims they ‘can’t follow’ Irvine Welsh, James Kelman or Roddy Doyle’s dialogue at all seriously. I suspect the real problem lies elsewhere.
+1
And as for the Brontes, I can confirm that while most people find Joseph of Wuthering Heights unintelligible when we begin the novel, they are able to "understand" him by the end of the unit. In Wuthering Heights, dialect plays a key role in communicating nuances of class and social hierarchy (even among the servants), and this prompts essential discussion. If one considers Emily Bronte's use of dialect in her novel pointless, then one is missing the point. Society has evolved since the 19th century, but taking the time to consider what elements of a lost culture are communicated via Bronte's use of dialect is valuable, and I find it sad that there are people who fail to recognize that there may be more going on with the dialect than things a 2017 reader would recognize from our world.
Trainspotting would be a different text entirely if rendered into standard English. And I don't think I'd care to read a "translation" of TS.
I find that people who "can't follow" Irvine Welsh or Roddy Doyle (or the Bronte's dialect-speakers) are the sort of people who give up after a page or two.