Pete's Manner of Speaking

Dwight Decker deckerd at agcs.com
Mon Oct 31 18:02:40 CET 1994


There seems to be some confusion about what exactly is meant by
the words "accent" and "dialect." My understanding of them is
that Pete has a distinctive personal manner of speaking (the
technical term in linguistics is "idiolect"), but I wouldn't
call it an accent or a dialect. He's a tough guy, not well
educated, impatient, abrasive, bad-tempered, often an outright
criminal: he speaks standard English with no regional accent,
but with often poor grammar, with considerable use of slang
and colloquialisms, not to mention criminal jargon. He doesn't
speak with an accent (in the sense of a foreigner trying to
speak English or a native English-speaker from a region with
a distinctive local pronunciation); he's just rough and a little
sloppy. Different writers approach him with varying degrees of
phonetic spelling, but even if he was written with perfectly
proper English, you'd still know it was him just from his
attitude and maybe an occasional "HAR!" A dialect is more
advanced than a regional accent, and usually includes not
just differences in pronunciation but different words as well.
About the third definition down, my dictionary allows that a
dialect can be the language distinctive of a given class or
profession, so maybe Pete could be described as speaking with
(or in) a criminal dialect -- but I don't think so. Most
writers I've seen have never taken it beyond having Pete use
a word like "loot" or "swag." In any case, an individual
character's distinctive pronunciation or characteristic
choice of words aren't really accents or dialects (unless
the character is, say, Southern American like Brer Rabbit,
or Scottish, like Scrooge's relatives). Goofy and Pete have
distinctive ways of talking, but the word is probably "idiolect."
	From reading Barks, I get the idea Scrooge did not speak
with an obvious Scottish accent in the present day. Maybe some
trace of it was left in his pronunciation, but Barks never
spelled it out. Scrooge seemed to talk like an old American
man of the 1950s (which is hardly surprising, since his dialogue
was being written by an American man in later middle age in the
1950s). The Duck Tales innovation of having Alan Young voice
Scrooge with a Scottish accent was kind of strange to me and I'm
not sure I like it.
	At Egmont, the house language is English, even though the
company's offices are in Denmark. Comic scripts are in English
so local publishers in umpteen different countries can translate
them into their local languages. In my rendering of scripts by
Danish, Italian, and Swedish writers into English, I've been
told to make the scripts read like they were written in English
in the first place; i.e., they have to read smoothly, as if written
by a native speaker. They have to be funny, yet not depend on puns.
Dialect, phonetic spelling of accents -- all that has to be only
lightly hinted at, if at all, just for the merest touch of flavor,
since it would be lost in the translation and might only confuse
the translators. So imagine Brer Rabbit stories where all the
characters are speaking quite proper English (instead of "Ah'm
takin' a powerful likin' to de notion of whackin' up alongside de
haidbone, Brer Fox," -- insert "you" between whackin' and up).
	At Gladstone, since the stories are being published in English,
I can use more exaggerated speech patterns (I really had fun with
the Dutch pirate story I recently translated for Donald Duck
Adventures), but word has come down that Disney itself, which
has to approve stories intended for American publication, gets
Really Nervous about obvious ethnic accents. Well, hush mah mouf!
Hoot mon, laddie! Ach du lieber! Heap bad news for paleface funnybook
writer! Sacre bleu and oo la la! Must use honorable Engrish ranguage
as same is wlitten in honorable grammar book!
	Oh well...

--Dwight Decker




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