From: dsgood@gmail.com   
      
   	bre...@sff.net 	   
   Jul 10 (23 hours ago)   
      
      
   "You know what I would do? I would go train your ear. Not the eye, the   
   ear. Listen to people of a certain group, or class, or era, talk.   
      
   "And! The internet is your friend in this. I would go over to   
   storycorps.org, and start listening to oral histories. WWI veterans, or   
   Nebraska farmers, or people who came over from Lithuania fleeing the   
   Nazis, or second-generation Kkoreans. Find a group (not too big, not too   
   small) and listen to them all. Or if you want to wander slightly further   
   afield, there is a UK equivalent. And over at the Imperial War Museum   
   web site they have oral histories of various vets.   
      
   "It's not in crude things like subject-verb order. It's in word choice   
   and cadence. That's how you manipulate foreign-ness. You can only pick   
   that up by ear."   
      
   Based on my experience with differing versions of English, I have some   
   cautions.   
      
   1) People sometimes autocorrect what they hear. I sometimes say to strange   
   dogs "Careful, dog; I bite."  A few dog owners then assure me that their dog   
   doesn't bite.   
      
   2) People who pronounce "Don" and "Dawn" with the same vowel have trouble   
   hearing the difference when others pronounce them differently.   
      
   And:  One British writer, told he couldn't use a certain obscenity in print,   
   used "For cough."   
      
   My amendment to your advice:  If possible, have someone who speaks that   
   particular version of a language look over your dialog.   
      
   And: One pro sf/fantasy writer had an expert on weather/climate say -"It never   
   snows in Hawaii."  Not at Honolulu's altitude, but it sometimes does at very   
   high altitudes.   
      
   Dan Goodman   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)