Hi, Dallas!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:   
      
   AH>  Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first   
   AH>  person.   
      
                               [...]   
      
   DH>  It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in   
   DH>  works by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James   
   DH>  Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author is   
   DH>  trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect   
   DH>  -- and in order to do so it's often necessary to spell   
   DH>  a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the way the   
   DH>  character would have done.   
      
      
             Exactly....  :-)   
      
      
      
   DH>  In addition, we must remember the audience for which the   
   DH>  piece was written.   
      
      
             Uh-huh.  With the invention of the printing press & the rise of the   
   middle class their target audience was the paterfamilias who would purchase a   
   novel *he* liked the looks of... and then read it aloud to the entire family.   
      
      
      
   DH>  For example, a British audience of Stevenson's time might   
   DH>  not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as a   
   DH>  sailor would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver   
   DH>  he spells it "gunnel" to give the right sound.   
      
      
             | Adding the proviso that there may be umpteen different editions of   
   classics such as TREASURE ISLAND & various editors may have their own ideas:   
      
             Yes.  It wouldn't be in anybody's best interests to delay the action   
   while Papa struggles with "forecastle" or "boatswain", either.  The author who   
   knows which side his bread is buttered on may use apostrophes to represent the   
   letters and/or the syllables an experienced sailor would probably omit when he   
   is trying to make himself understood over a howling gale.  We have other words   
   like that in English... "Worcestershire", for example.  In such cases I figure   
   the pronunciation may have changed where the spelling hasn't, but my life does   
   not depend on how quickly I can get the idea across to folks from Russia.  And   
   if they want to look it up the standard spelling usually works better....  ;-)   
      
      
      
   DH>  Pi comes from India, and we don't know (at least, I don't   
   DH>  know!) how he would normally speak - and would he even think   
   DH>  in English or is it translated for us without telling us?   
      
      
             Perhaps we don't need to know.  In this story he's alone most of the   
   time, and when he finally runs aground in Mexico (or wherever) the first human   
   beings he meets don't speak English.  Nowadays international publishing houses   
   employ people to massage an author's dialect so that readers from the US won't   
   get upset because s/he uses British English & readers from elsewhere won't get   
   upset because s/he doesn't, but grade eight errors seem to be universal.  :-))   
      
      
      
      
   --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+   
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)