From: john@jfeldredge.com

On Tue, 14 Jul 2015 17:26:51 -0400, Michelle Bottorff wrote:

> William Vetter  wrote:
>
>> >> I ask because other people are talking about spellings that
>> >> supposedly express English dialects.
>> >
>> > I'm not attempting to duplicate any particular English dialect, and I
>> > hadn't planned to use variant spellings.
>>
>> "Out of the pan and into the far."
>> I told him that he spelled _fire_ wrong.  He wrote back to me and said
>> this was how people spoke it in rural Kentucky.
>
> I think it's pretty silly to expect every reader of English everywhere
> will a) be familiar with a Kentucky dialect, and would therefore b)
> recognize that far was therefore not a typo for fire.
>
> But at the same time, not being very good at figuring out what the
> reader won't know is one of my biggest weaknesses, so I feel like I'm
> the pot calling the kettle black when i say that.
>
>
> Out of curiousity...
>
> Would seein' words like bein', doin' and hearin' throw you?  :)
>
> I used those back in the second and third books I wrote.  Although I've
> mostly avoided phonetic spelling since then (I'm currently on book 14),
> I haven't given up on someday revisiting those two books.
>
> I don't currently see any reason for editing those out.  I don't think
> they're particularly confusing or difficult to read.
>
> But I read a fair number of Westerns growing up, so I might be biased.
> :)

Having gone to high school in rural Appalachian Kentucky, I can say that
the actual pronunciation of "fire" is closer to "faar".  "Far" doesn't
adequately convey the drawl.

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