George Savary Wasson's Approach to Dialect Writing

tradition of the American local colorists, and the locale of his stories was Kittery Point, village in coastal Maine next to the New Hampshire border. His fiction, which is filled with dialog, captures the folk speech of southern Maine with high degree of fidelity (Bennett 1974).' Not only are the vocabulary and local expressions faithful, but the phonology of the native dialog is also true, expressed clearly and effectively by an orthographic system as exact and consistent as the English alphabet allows. Wasson's literary treatment of dialect is comparable with that of the Southern local colorist Joel Chandler Harris (Ives 1954), even down to such details as the use of the apostrophe to signal certain phonemes (though transcription must have been easier for the New Englander's homogeneous dialect than for the more intricate, socially layered one of the Georgian). Wasson's northern dialect offers further substantiation of the principles set forth by Sumner Ives in his Theory of Literary Dialect (1950); Ives might well have used Wasson instead of Harris for good many of his examples. Recently I have come into possession of two sets of documents that give further insight into Wasson's approach to dialect writing. The first is group of letters, dated 1908, between the author and George Chase, classicist and, in his own phrase, a philologist and student of Maine speech, in which the correspondents discuss dialect writing in general and comment specifically on Wasson's practice. Included with the letters are some contemporary reviews of Wasson's work, among them critique in the York (Maine) Transcript quoting Chase himself. Second, and perhaps more important, are two of Wasson's personal notebooks in which for over decade he made jottings, many of linguistic nature, for possible use in his fiction.2 Along with considerable collection of anecdotal material, the notebooks contain large body of phonological, morphological, lexical, and onomastic data that reveals much about the dialect Wasson was interested in. The two notebooks consist chiefly of matter that went into Wasson's last published collection, Home from Sea (1907). By comparing them, we can observe the process through which the writer transformed the raw data of his notes into the language of his fiction

Art · Art history · George (robot · Linguistics · Literature · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies · Classics · History · Philosophy

• Invariant Be in New England Folk Speech

  Adrian Pablé, Radosław Dylewski•American Speech•2007

  Add to list

• Spitten Image

  Laurence R Horn•American Speech•2004

  Add to list

• George Savary Wasson and the Dialect of Kittery Point, Maine

  Jacob Bennett, B J Irwin•American Speech•1974

  Add to list

• Our Heritage of Old Sea Terms

  George Savary Wasson•American Speech•1929

  Add to list