Interacting of stylistically coloured words and context

 

GENERAL COMPREHENSION

 

BE READY TO SPEAK ON:

1. Super-neutral words and their functioning in fiction.

2. Sub-neutral words and their functioning in fiction.

3. Dialect words in literature.

DETAILED COMPREHENSION

1. READ M.Gilmore’s story “Flora” and ANSWER the questions:

· What was the father's mother tongue?

· Why does the author think that the Aboriginal lan­guage can be lost?

· Why is Aboriginal language considered to be «poeti­cal»?

· What was Flora's native name?

· Why did the author's mother want to visit the native camp?

· What song did author's mother sing and what was the native's reaction to her singing?

· What animals did Flora draw?

· Why did the author never see Flora again?

 

2. ANSWER what role the following stylistic devices play in the story:

1. In the rapidity of slaughter before interest could be awakened.

2. The bare scaffolding of the structure.

3. Centuries of culling and shaping.

4. The perceptive energy of the tribal mind.

5. The mere skeleton of language.

6. She had the vitality of a tribal stripling.

7. So that eyes might not trespass.

M. gilmore

Flora

My father could make himself understood in several na­tive dialects and spoke one well, and I remember him once standing between two men, one a local native and one a stranger, neither of whom could understand the other, and interpreting for them. He also spoke the Gaelic as his mother tongue. Sitting at evening in talk at home, he used to explain to us the differences between the native idiom, the Gaelic, and the English. I recollect him saying what I have never heard from anyone else; and that is that, in the rapidity of slaughter before interest could be awakened, the natural rich­ness and poetry of Aboriginal tongues as created by customs and usage was lost, and that only the bare scaffolding of the structure and narrowed vocabularies remained. That is to say, there is more or less a dictionary collection of Aboriginal words and phrases, but not the living thing born of the daily uses of life, and of centuries of culling and shaping. To this one can add that in killing - off the elder men and women who were the direct inheritors of the past, not only with its lore butwith the language of its lore, the result has been that only the less educated (using the word in its best sense) were left to carry on what had been received from the ages. Fur­ther, it is certain that instead of intellectual men being in a position to develop thought and explain it even to the white man, the perceptive energy of the tribal mind had to be given to the problem of escape from death and to the immediate needs of survival. The natives were in the same position, relatively, as Sydney would be if her university, libraries, colleges and schools were destroyed. For it is obvious that where there is no script — no literature in symbol — and decimation is so intense that tribal oral continuity is reduced to practically nothing, everything but the mere skeleton of language, together with its untranslatable freight of living meaning giving by occasion, must be lost. Having gone, there is no one left alive to pick it up and carry it in again. The Aboriginals had no Rosetta stone and no monuments to tell us their story or give us its full interpretation. We may re­build physical form and shape from a fossil, but no matter how painstaking we are, all but the most limited relics of native «literature* are lost beyond recovery. Only that sec­tion of the language connected with objects, and used in an objective way, can with any certainty be regained. In other words, and to give another illustration of parallel from that already used, if the whole of Sydney save Camperdown were obliterated, practically nothing of all that this city means and contains even of religious lore, to say nothing about poetry and legend, would be preserved for the scientist, the philosopher and the critic of the future. We write in books, in steel, and in stone. The Aboriginals wrote and worked in perishables; and when we burned him and his in forest fires, we burned his knowledge and his centuries with him.

In regard to the tribal speech father always said that while there was no similarity in structure, there was a closer like­ness of the Gaelic than to the English in that it was figura­tive, and that words and phrases (as of course with us) had a narrow or a wide application according as one intended. For instance, description was given vividly in analogies, while the language was in its own way poetical. Indeed, «poetical was the word he used; and as he talked he would translate and give illustrations of what he meant. The names of women and girls, for instance, were nearly always related to that which was beautiful, delicate, or womanly; while men's names referred to the strong, the brave, the swift, the good hunter, and so on. In confirmation of this, Basedow I think it is, mentions in his book that beautiful and fine names were giv­en to children with the idea of the child growing like the name. This in itself shows a natural idealism and a form of native suggestion, as appellations were to be a help and not a hindrance to the characters of those who bore them. My own child-name given me by the natives meant «The delicate little white flower. My nurse's name (my mother, not being able to compass the tongue, called her Chloe) was «She has the brightness of a star; or, as my father varied it, «She is bright like a star or starlike.* Our word «Stella, he said, was a parallel. Of the three women we had for the house one was Flora. Her native name meant, «She is like, or has, the sweetness of a bunch of flowers; so my mother called her Flora.

Flora was regarded as an unusually handsome woman; her features were well marked, and she had beautiful eyes; as indeed all the young women had. She was tall, somewhere about five feet ten, for starvation had not yet stunted Abo­riginal growth. Her manner was as bright as her glossy skin, she had the vitality of a tribal stripling, an ear for music, a fine voice for singing, and she could draw unusually well. All this without contact with the whites, of course, for I was the first white child she had ever seen, and my mother the only white woman.

My father himself never visited, and never allowed the men under him to visit a native camp unless permission were asked of the chief or the head of the group, a permission only given then to exceptionally trusted people; and my father's name among the blacks was «The man who is just, «The man who never breaks his word, and, in other phrasing, «The man who is a friend and can be trusted.» Actually he had been made a brother of the Waradgery tribe. Flora being regarded as more than unusually clever, he asked if he might one day take my mother to the camp to see her drawings and hear her sing. Leave being given, the chief took all the other men and the youths away hunting for the day, as they must not know that a «brother» had spoken to his «sisters» — father having to act as interpreter for my mother. When we came to the camp he did not go near the women, but from a distance stood and spoke. The eldest woman came forward to hear what he had to say. My mother, he said, wishing to see Flora draw and to hear her sing, we had come to ask her permission to hear and see what she could do.

After some parley Flora was persuaded to come forward, all the other young women remaining seated and partly turned away from us so that eyes might not trespass, but with the ear turned so that they could hear. My mother, having heard her sing several songs, regarded Flora's singing as untuneful, and unfortunately said so, while the expression of her face showed it. So father explained that the scale was not ours, and that only a violin or harp could reproduce it. To show what real singing was, my mother, who had a beautiful voice, sang «The Bonnie Hills of Scotland. The audience rejected it; they said there was no bird sound in it; that it was too loud; that it was noise and not song.

She had sung a civilized song and they thought less of it than their own! My mother was very much offended-

After the singing the drawing began. Standing on one foot Flora swept a clear space on the ground with the other foot. When it was smooth she caught a twig between her toes, broke it to length, and still with the foot began to draw in outline whatever we asked for. She did a kangaroo sitting, an old-man kangaroo in full speed followed by a female and two joeys, one of the latter half-grown; and after these she showed a possum, perfectly done, crouched on the limb of a tree. For this there was part of the tree-trunk, some leafage, and a melon-shaped moon at the back. Continuing¹ she did the wig­gle-waggle line that means a snake, and followed that with a kookaburra, a peewee, a crow, and a spiky thing which I had not seen before but which was an echidna. Last of all she made a man and a woman, the man straight down both sides, the woman widened at the hips. The work was done with the utmost rapidity, and without the alteration of a single line.

My mother criticized the man and woman as drawn, and showed how it should be done in our way. The blacks said contemptuously of the figures that those were not men and women, adding that they were only clothes, and clothes were not people.

After that, for my benefit, the women imitated birds. They brought the kookaburras, crows, magpies, and the peewees all round the trees, and had some of the smaller birds flutter­ing about us from the bushes. One they caught by hand as it darted past, giving it to me to hold, but my hands were inef­ficient and it got away. There was hardly a local bird that was not imitated. We could not have done it; our vocal cords were trained on a different scale, our ears untrained to a bird-note and its strange intervals.

I never saw Flora again, for soon after this the secret un­official leave for extermination came from Sydney. From that time on, the blacks were fugitives.

   

REFERENCES

1. Ивашкина, М.П. Практикум по стилистике английского языка [Текст]/М.П.Ивашкина, А.В.Сдобников, А.В.Семен. - Нижний Новгород, 1999.

3. Косоножкина, Л.В. Практическая стилистика английского языка: анализ художественного текста: Учебное пособие[Текст] / Л.В.Косоножкина. -Ростов-на-Дону: Издательство центр «Март», 2004. – С.182-189.  

 

ANALYZING FAIRY-TALE

DETAILED COMPREHENSION

1. ANALYZE the fairy tale by Rudyard Kipling “The Cat That Walked by Himself” with the help of USEFUL PHRASES TO ANALYZE A STORY.

 

Rudyard Kipling