Hi Ardith -- on May 23 2013 at 21:23, you wrote:   
      
   AH>          Ah... but the author has Pi tell the story in the first   
   AH> person.  As a translator of stories you need to be aware of the   
   [...]   
   AH> errors from time to time, however... or uses a variant spelling in   
   AH> preference to the more conventional "gunwale"... that's in   
   AH> character!  At a fairly similar age Huckleberry Finn was speaking as   
   AH> a kid who had skipped out of school & who lived in the southeastern   
   AH> US would have spoken in Mark Twain's day.  I don't expect such   
   AH> fictitious personages to dot all the i's & cross all the t's   
   AH> correctly.  When other adults here ask me to "find two errors,   
   AH> please" I see they're operating on a much more advanced level....   
   AH> ;-)   
      
   It seems to me that this passage is akin to those in works by Mark Twain,   
   Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, and others, in that the author   
   is trying to reproduce the character's speech AND dialect -- and in order to   
   do so it's often necessary to spell a word (or misuse a grammatical point) the   
   way the character would have done. In addition, we must remember the audience   
   for which the piece was written. For example, a British audience of   
   Stevenson's time might not be familiar with the pronunciation of "gunwale" as   
   a sailor would say it, hence when he quotes Long John Silver he spells it   
   "gunnel" to give the right sound.   
      
   Pi comes from India, and we don't know (at least, I don't know!) how he would   
   normally speak - and would he even think in English or is it translated for us   
   without telling us?   
      
      
   Cheers... Dallas   
      
   --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+   
    * Origin: The BandMaster, CANADA [telnet: bandmaster.tzo.com] (1:153/715)