Often, in English-language prose, “shortcut phrases” are used to help depict realistic speech:
– "Gimme a light."
– “Dunno, officer … a lot of people come through here every night.”
– "Whaddaya mean you lost him?!?"
…
I assume there are similar devices in many languages. What are some commonly-used examples in other Roman-alphabet languages? Also:
Are there similar kinds of devices for languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet? Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Korean, Japanese (kanji) etc? No reason there wouldn’t be, I reckon.
How about languages with logographically-derived writing like Chinese?
I don’t know if this is actually *written *in Chinese or not, but people in northeast China (a region famed for unusual language mannerisms or ways of speaking) will often say gansh’ar instead of *ganshemeh *(something that roughly translated to English means, “What?” or “What for?”) It shortens three syllables to two like the way ‘gimme’ shortens ‘give to me.’
But again, I don’t know if this can actually be *written *that way, and with each Chinese character usually representing one syllable, I suspect it can’t.
Joual french, spoken in Quebec, has some of these: “entéca” for en tout cas (“anyway”), “bengadon” for bien, regardes-donc (“well, look at that”), “asteur” for à cette here (“right now”), “té” and “tsé” for tu es and tu sais (“you are” and “you know”), and so forth.
Of course, these wouldn’t be written out this way in formal writing, just as “whaddaya” wouldn’t be written out that way in formal English writing either.
In Spanish, the preposition para is often reduced to pa’ in speech (and written that way in informal writing), especially before a vowel. An example is the Pitbull song Echa Pa’lla (Manos Pa’rriba) (Go Away/Hands Up).
In Spanish and as a general rule, written language does NOT try to reproduce speech patterns exactly. It can be done, but it’s not the norm and in fact it goes against the general norm; doing it for every bit of dialogue as it is the general usage in English would be considered overkill in most contexts.
In an internet context or a comic book it would be more common, but in a novel, newspaper article etc. you spell “standard” even if the pronunciation is not. The words will be those the person would speak, the pronunciation will only be spelled out once or maybe twice in order to indicate the presence of an accent.
So, an Argentinian character will use the vos form of “you” rather than tú or usted, different people will construct diminutives differently, but specific pronunciations will not be reflected. A few grammatical details plus word choice is considered to be enough to indicate which dialect people speak; trying to reflect pronunciation by back-transliteration would generally be considered both unnecesary and distracting, and this includes things such as “those 'd’s nobody pronounces”, words getting smooshed up, etc.
Note that Colibri’s example is a song: that is, it’s something that was written to be listened to, not read. In fact, the use of the apostrophe is an English influence: while nowadays lots of us are doing it, it’s a recent phenomenon. Pallá and parriba would be the more “normative” spellings.
Panamanian Spanish, like other varieties of “Caribbean” Spanish, has a tendency to drop letters such as the “d” in the ending -ado. This has become incorporated in the most common spelling of some place names, such as Playa Venao, whose actual name is Playa Venado (Deer Beach).
Vernacular Japanese uses a lot of contractions when it comes to borrowed words.
Eg., pasokon for personal computer, Konbini for convenience store, and my personal favorite, amesho for American shorthair.
But they also use a lot of grammatical shorthand in informal speech.
A common example is saying *“wakan’nai” *(dunno) instead of “wakaranai” (don’t know).
These can all be shown in printed form, as they are contractions of the phonetic kana characters that accompany the kanji to form verb conjugations.
The sneaky thing about Japanese language in print is that they often also use small-font *kana *alongside the *kanji *characters to provide the phonetic reading of the kanji. This is often played around with in comics, especially, to provide both the standard-language vocabulary (making the meaning clear) and a comic book character’s *spoken *language (slang, dialect, etc.).
It’s rarely laid on that thick in English novels (though Dickens, et al, have taken it pretty far).
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Nava’s last paragraph is imformative – I have seen that in both Spanish and Italian, some of these smushed-up phrases get a proper “non-apostrophized” spelling and get incorporated into (at least the informal register of) the language proper.
This case is kind of the opposite – a phrase shortened even in formal speech (right?) retains the long-obsolete spelling. Does it ever get rendered as something like "esque … ?") in very informal French writing?
Google returns tons of hits for Esqu’ and a couple for esque. The latter is harder to search because “esque tu” brings back mostly Spanish, but there’s some “esque vous” results.
One fairly obscure English-language writer who wrote a lot of phonetic dialect works was the late 19th and early 20th century comedy writer Marietta Holley, I spoze.
Yes, although it’s pretty impolite. It just means “what?”, the usage and its connotations are the same. Saying “¿qué?” is akin to “what?”; saying “¿mande lo qué?” (or, worse, “¿mande lo quéeeeee?”), which I have no idea how to translate, is along the lines of “someone tell me that what I thought I understood is not what was said”; saying “¿disculpe?” or “¿perdón?” would be “excuse me?” both in a literal and connotations sense.
Like about every dialect, except when the speaker is giving a speech or dictating. That’s the “d nobody pronounces” I was referring to.
Do speakers of other dialects frequently spell words without the “d”? Because this is something I have seen not only in Panama but also in Cuba and Puerto Rico in casual writing. (I’m not speaking of printed writing, but hand-written notes, signs, and graffiti). I can’t recall seeing words written this way in other Spanish-speaking countries.
This dropping of the “d” I understand to be one of the characteristics of Caribbean Spanish, although it may be present in other dialects. If you may forgive citing Wiki:
meaning “What’s up?” or “What’s going on?” Literally, “What [are] the matters?”
Strict pronunciation would be “Mah ha-inyanim?” (all the vowels pronounced about like in Spanish). Colloquial pronunciation is more like “Manyanim?” I think there are a lot of common Hebrew phases that would be shortened like that.
I don’t know if this would be abbreviated in written text – I’m guessing not.
ETA: Reference: Hebrew phasebook from Wikitravel. (Doesn’t show the abbreviated pronunciations, but does show the spelling and translations for lots of phrases.)
