|
Bleeding Kansas Resoure
Summary- Sophia meets Mr. William, a slave owned by the Jordan family who will also be a pivotal character, and comes to realize that the time and place she is in is Bleeding Kansas. Chapter 10 should mostly be devoted to making students understand this historical context. Points of connection for Muslim students “Something that sounded lilting and familiar” - this “lilting” of Mr. William’s accent is going to be related to Sophia having heard similar accents before from Muslim friends she knew from Somalia and Sudan. A “lilting” accent is one that goes up and down in intonation (the word comes from ‘lute’) it is commonly used to describe Irish accents. I am not expert enough to say for sure really but I believe the author is mistaken in attributing this feature to a Somali accent, the way that Somalis often enunciate Arabic phrases can differ from Arabs in that it often devoids certain words of accentuation where there ought to be, to me this lens itself to being less lilting. Also, it is going to turn out that Mr. William is from Senegal in West Africa and to brush a broad stroke and say that Somalis, Sudanese, and Senegalese all have a shared feature in their accents that can be so easily identified seems to be brushing too broad a stroke to me. Further, the speech patterns of Mr. William seem to be modeled to a certain degree after Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - there are of course linguistics who attribute the features of African American accents of English to the origins of West African languages but coalescing this with Sudanese and Somali does not seem right to me.
1 Comment
|