Ohio
Kansas

[Document 7]

Notes by an editor on dialect usage in accounts
by interviews with ex-slaves. (To be used in
conjunction with Supplementary Instructions 9E.)

Simplicity in recording the dialect is to be desired in order to hold
the interest and attention of the readers. It seems to me that readers
are repelled by pages sprinkled with misspellings, commas and
apostrophes. The value of exact phonetic transcription is, of course, a
great one. But few artists attempt this completely. Thomas Nelson Page
was meticulous in his dialect; Joel Chandler Harris less meticulous but
in my opinion even more accurate. But the values they sought are
different from the values that I believe this book of slave narratives
should have. Present day readers are less ready for the over-stress of
phonetic spelling than in the days of local color. Authors realize this:
Julia Peterkin uses a modified Gullah instead of Gonzales' carefully
spelled out Gullah. Howard Odum has questioned the use of goin' for
going since the g is seldom pronounced even by the educated.

Truth to idiom is more important, I believe, than truth to
pronunciation. Erskine Caldwell in his stories of Georgia, Ruth Suckow
in stories of Iowa, and Nora Neale Hurston in stories of Florida Negroes
get a truth to the manner of speaking without excessive misspellings. In
order to make this volume of slave narratives more appealing and less
difficult for the average reader, I recommend that truth to idiom be
paramount, and exact truth to pronunciation secondary.

I appreciate the fact that many of the writers have recorded
sensitively. The writer who wrote "ret" for right is probably as
accurate as the one who spelled it "raght." But in a single publication,
not devoted to a study of local speech, the reader may conceivably be
puzzled by different spellings of the same word. The words "whafolks,"
"whufolks," "whi'foiks," etc., can all be heard in the South. But
"whitefolks" is easier for the reader, and the word itself is suggestive
of the setting and the attitude.

Words that definitely have a notably different pronunciation from the
usual should be recorded as heard. More important is the recording of
words with a different local meaning. Most important, however, are the
turns of phrase that have flavor and vividness. Examples occurring in
the copy I read are: