I have to admit, I just hit google every time I wanted Lucia or the priest to code-switch ;-) There's one bit where Lucia's brother is writing a letter to Eva and I used a bit there too. I suspect that the core structure has changed little since 1937 when the book I read about Jamaica, Tell My Horse, was written, though the vocabulary would have. I avoided the cruder terms which are probably more modern and which Lucia would not have used in any case.
There was a girl who had a whole youtube series on speaking patois and hearing it spoken was quite intriguing.
Also, "bloodclot" and "clot" appear to have been swear words. But I just could not imagine her saying "Oh bloodclots!", it sounded too bizarre to me, so I haven't featured it. I want to err on the side of not sounding ridiculous since it's a culture I'm not familiar with.
And, as Lucia says to Mackenzie - "The difference between you and me, Robin, is that one of us speaks a dialect of incomprehensible gibberish - and the other is Jamaican."
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ninetydegrees
Jamaican Patois
on 2012-05-07 01:22 pm (UTC)There was a girl who had a whole youtube series on speaking patois and hearing it spoken was quite intriguing.
Also, "bloodclot" and "clot" appear to have been swear words. But I just could not imagine her saying "Oh bloodclots!", it sounded too bizarre to me, so I haven't featured it. I want to err on the side of not sounding ridiculous since it's a culture I'm not familiar with.
And, as Lucia says to Mackenzie - "The difference between you and me, Robin, is that one of us speaks a dialect of incomprehensible gibberish - and the other is Jamaican."