A True Story: Read over and over and over again.

I must admit:  reading that Mark Twain excerpt was a bit of a struggle. It took my undivided attention and I had to think about what was being said. I was not surprised by the linguistic features and differences among the reading. The biggest one was the pronunciation. I began to read it out loud because it was so hard for me to "interpret" what was being said. I started to talk like Aunt Rachel. My voice had a bit of a twang in it and my pronunciation was way off. I believe that pronunciation was the big problem. Aunt Rachel did not pronunciate very many of her words, leaving a lot of them "half said", like "an'"and "de". The syntax of her English is totally different. If you were to classify her language (as we did in class on wednesday) Aunt Rachel would be in the lower class portion, uneducated, speaking "uneducated" english. Aside from the "proper" use, it sounds the same. I could gather what was being said and could easily figure out what she meant because of the way it sounded. That is one pro to the English language. It is easy to determine what one is trying to say...even though it took me a few times to read it.