"Patois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the opinion that the poetry of Lamartine and Victor Hugo would have been as fine as the poetry of Jasmin had they been so fortunate as to use his mother-tongue. 'The French language was a kind of Gallic patois mixed with German, while the true langue d'Oc, as I must know, was the language of the Romans.' This same philologist took me also to the little valley of 'Verona,' where he showed me not only a small vineyard, the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... he need a Sheriff to tell him when to spik?" was Grassette's surly comment. Then he turned to the Governor. "Let us speak in French," he said in patois. "This rope-twister will not understan'. He is no ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a language, sir," he said. "A dialect, a patois. Partly Turkish, partly Slavonic, with a ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Flemish) overseas departments: French, Creole patois ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and the lowland Scotch, an ancient branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... with Indian wordlessness, handed the net to him. Whereupon, with his flabby mouth wide and his large gray eyes gleaming, he proceeded to miss four easy ones in succession. And with that Josef, in a gibberish which is French-Canadian patois of the inner circles, addressed the Tin Lizzie and took away the net from him, asking no orders from me. The Lizzie, pipe in mouth as always, smiled just as pleasantly under this punishment as in the hour of his opportunities. He would have been a very ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... and have contented ourselves with providing a scrap, here and there, to the reader—despairing, as we utterly do, to gather from memory a full description of a performance so perfectly unique in its singular compound of lofty vein, with the patois and vulgar contractions of his native, and those common ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... rich and poor speak correctly; there is no vulgar style; but children have a 'patois' of their own, using many words in their play which men would scorn to repeat. The Bamapela have adopted a click into their dialect, and a large infusion of the ringing "ny", which seems to have been for the purpose of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... fingers of iron, and bitten by his wife, who tore away at him with a will, gnawing him as a dog gnaws a bone, he thought instantly of a better way to gratify his rage. Then the devil, newly horned, maliciously ordered, in his patois, the servants to tie the lovers with the silken cords of the trap, and throwing the poniard away, he helped the duenna to make them fast. And the thing thus done in a moment, he rammed some linen into their mouths to stop their cries, and ran to his good poniard ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... are Polynesians, men of very large stature, rough in manner, and not very easily managed. I landed there and waded across the reef among forty or fifty men. On the beach a large party assembled. I told them in a sort of Polynesian patois, that I wished to take away two lads from their island, that I might learn their language, and come back and teach them many things for their good. This they did not agree to. They said that some of the full-grown men wished to go away with me; but to this I in my turn could ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... clerical garb. The priest did not understand Latin any more than the abbot understood Greek, and the situation became awkward, for the pitch of Martin's voice made it evident that he was not a person to be trifled with. The old man therefore tried what the Romance patois, which he had picked up from foreign residents in the city, could do to establish intelligible intercourse with the rough visitor. Fortunately the crusader also knew something of that patois, and made the purpose of his visit sufficiently ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... it was colored, dominated by the existence of the German-speaking cantons, more numerous than the French. "Of course," he said, "we have our private sympathies, which incline us one way or the other, and there is the language tie—though here we are greatly attached to our Bernese patois—but I would have you believe the Swiss are essentially just and impartial, they look at ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... married, I spent a month full of surprises. How everything differed from America, and even from the plain below! The peasants, many of them at least, can neither speak French nor understand it. Their language is a patois, resembling both Spanish and Italian, and they cling to it with astonishing pertinacity. Their agricultural implements are not less quaint than their speech. The plow is a long beam with a most primitive share ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... peasant. A favorite among the Bavarians, judging from the frequency with which it is met with in all parts of Bavaria, represents a peasant in a balcony waving her kerchief to her lover, departing in a little skiff, on an intensely blue sea. Beneath, in patois, is the doggerel: ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... a separate race, with its own patois, in Monaco. You would never spot it in the somewhat Teutonic cosmopolitanism of the Condamine and Monte Carlo tradesmen and hotel servants. It is not apparent in the impassive croupiers of the Casino. But within a few hundred yards, in half a dozen streets and lanes, the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... language was marvellous; from the finest works of Calderon to the ballads in the patois of every province, he could quote, to the infinite delight of those with whom he associated. He could assume any character that he pleased: he could be the Castilian, haughty and reserved; the Asturian, stupid and plodding; the Catalonian, intriguing and cunning; the Andalusian, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... traveller, who was now within a dozen yards, were already exchanging words in a patois not unlike the Limousin dialect, of which ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... their native valleys! I would if I were they. I asked him about education. He said his children went to a school kept by Catholic sisters, who taught reading, writing, and Latin. The dialect of Chamouni is a patois, composed of French and Latin. He said that provision was very scarce in the winter. I asked how they made their living when there were no travellers to be guided up Mont Blanc. He had a trade at which he wrought in winter months, and his wife ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lost or missed through diverse reincarnations; but sooner or later found again and known as soon as found to both. No wooing is necessary in such a case—they meet, they look, they love, and naturally and immediately take up their old, but unforgotten love patois. They do not need to learn its sweet, broken syllables, its hand clasps and sighs, its glances and kisses; they are more natural to them than was the grammared language they learned through ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... further disputation in the compound. The troopers were squabbling amongst themselves; he was able to make this much out in spite of the fact that the sepoys, recruited exclusively from the native population of Khandawar, spoke a patois of Hindi so corrupt that even an expert in Oriental languages would experience difficulty in trying to interpret it. Amber did not weary himself with the task, but presently lifted up his voice and demanded silence, desiring to be informed if ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... moustache. His collar was incredibly tall and shiny, with turn-down points; he wore a red tie; his thick brown clothes might have been bought ready made in the Edgeware Road; evidently he had honoured the occasion with his Sunday best. While his comrades jabbered together, in patois which flung in a French word now and then, like a sop to Cerberus, he spoke not a word; yet I saw his lips tighten, as he laid his arm over the neck of a small but well-built mule of a colour which matched its master's ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... forced a mug of punch upon him; then he turned for the door, ordering the dog drivers to follow. But the warmth and promise of rest were too tempting, and they objected strenuously. The Kid was conversant with their French patois, and followed ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... leader, and who was frequently in my office, seeking positions for his constituents and other favors. That night he was in his shirt-sleeves among the boys. With the old volunteer fireman's swagger and the peculiar patois of that part of New York, he said: "Chauncey Depew, you have no business here. You are the president of the New York Central Railroad, ain't you, hey? You are a rich man, ain't you, hey? We are poor boys. You don't ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... unexpected reply, "Ou, juist sic as ane shutes dukes and sic like fules wi'." The answer was considered as a contempt of the House of Lords, and the poor provost would have suffered from misconception of his patois, had not the Duke of Argyle (who must have been exceedingly amused) explained that the worthy magistrate's expression, when rendered into English, did not apply to Peers and Idiots but to ducks and water-fowl. The circumstance is referred ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... have laid out 7s. 8d. in Watts's Hymns for Christmas presents for them. The eldest girl alone holds out; she has been at Boulogne, skirting upon the vast focus of Atheism, and imported bad principles in patois French. But the strongholds are crumbling. N. appears as yet to have but a confused notion of the Atonement. It makes him giddy, he says, to think much about it. But such giddiness ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... later, we found ourselves mingling unchallenged. They accepted us, may be, as a minor miracle of the night. They gazed at us curiously there in the light of the conflagration, and from us away to the burning island, and talked together in whispers, in a patois of which I caught but one word in three. They asked us no questions. Their voices filled the beach with a kind of subdued murmuring, all alike gentle and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the voices up. Miss Brewster, dining with her father a few hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in English, of the super-British patois. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... officers, there a knot of soldiers stood talking and laughing. The greater part of the civilians appeared to be Spaniards, but there was a large sprinkling of Jews in the dress of those of Barbary, and here and there a turbaned Moor. There were gangs of sailors likewise, Genoese, judging from the patois which they were speaking, though I occasionally distinguished the sound of "tou logou sas," by which I knew there were Greeks at hand, and twice or thrice caught a glimpse of the red cap and blue silken petticoats of the mariner from the Romaic isles. On ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... please to enter," the chief said, speaking a patois of Latin which Malchus found it difficult to understand. "We will then discuss the matters concerning ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... at a small bar, were talking excitedly in the Creole patois. They made frequent anxious, yet amusedly defiant, mention of a certain Pointe Canadienne. It was a portion of the Mississippi River "coast" not far above New Orleans, where the merchants of the city met the smugglers who came ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... man in Southern India. He was most capital company, rolling out perpetual jokes and calembour, and bubbling over with exuberant joie de vivre. I think M. Bayol took a fancy to me on account of my understanding his Provencale patois, for, as a boy, I had learnt French in ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... leave a permanent impress. But this impress is not in the valley of the Mississippi. It is true that a number of French still live on the banks of the great river, that many a little village where a French {436} patois is spoken lies hidden in the sequestered bayous of the South, and that no part of the old city of New Orleans possesses so much interest for the European stranger as the French or Creole quarter, with its quaint balconied houses and luxuriant gardens; but despite ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... the flow of eloquence, though the woman was really interesting with her straightforward confidences, her rather picturesque patois, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... saw regiment after regiment entraining—men from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... he might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio. She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables, she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... man put in in his patois, for they had been greatly disturbed by rumors among the country-folk and many soldiers already had ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... of goat-skin, coarse trousers reaching down to the knee, and his legs bound with long strips of wadding. "Who are you," he asked in his own language, "and how come you here?" As neither of the officers understood one word of the patois of the country they could only make signs that they wanted something to eat and drink. The peasant understood, and beckoned to them to come into the hut. As they entered he gave some instructions to a boy, who went out and presently returned with ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... which stood alone in all the world. For instance Monpavon had very near him—and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction—Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang Figaro in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais hair-dresser and the Hercules at a country ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... portion of our attire consisted of an extraordinary article, manufactured by a squaw out of smoked buckskin. Our muleteer, Delorier, brought up the rear with his cart, waddling ankle-deep in the mud, alternately puffing at his pipe, and ejaculating in his prairie patois: "Sacre enfant de garce!" as one of the mules would seem to recoil before some abyss of unusual profundity. The cart was of the kind that one may see by scores around the market-place in Montreal, and had a white covering to protect the articles within. These were our provisions ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man. But more than this. He had that secret of genius to draw from the bottom of society ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... purity of his Latin. During a shorter exile Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous, patois, bearing the same relation to the language of "Rasselas" which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say the vilest, parts of Mr. Galt's novels; sometimes of the perorations ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... refectory and served her with a dainty breakfast, disposed on exquisite "individual" dishes, and oddly enough, bearing the initial "D." Dolly lifted a cup and stared at it, wondering while Anita glibly explained in her patois of Spanish-English, that yes, indeed, ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... Meantime there had been preparation for its renewal. While in Rome and Constantinople, and in the districts under their immediate influence, this Roman art of pure descent was practised in all its refinement, an impure form of it—a patois of Romanesque—was carried by inferior workmen into distant provinces; and still ruder imitations of this patois were executed by the barbarous nations on the skirts of the empire. But these barbarous nations were in the strength of their youth; and while, in the centre of Europe, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... I know a little Italian, and my Gascon patois is something like Spanish: perhaps I may understand Latin without ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... crickets sang; the stream Plashed through my friend's narration Her rustic patois of the hills Lost in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of this tale, I could wish for a pen supernally dipped, or for a metaphysician's plating to my vernacular, or for the linguistic patois of that land off somewhere to the west of Life. Or maybe just a neurologist's chart of Hester's nerve history ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... throwing out considerable heat. Over this fire, they cooked a little soup for me. I remained in the hut until morning, stretching out on the floor for a little rest, while they stood about, speaking their mountain patois which I could not understand. I left them early in the morning, passing through wild mountain scenery and seeing no signs of habitation. No railroad or telegraph lines cross the river until near Lisbon and there was no way for me to get word ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... side, but the team and buggy had no sooner passed than he heard a whoa! and a man's face peered around the buggy wing, not at James, but at his medicine-case. James could just discern the face, bearded and shadowy in the gathering gloom. Then a voice came. It shouted, one word, the expressive patois of the countryside, that word which may be at once a question and a salute, may express almost any emotion. "Halloo!" said ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... operatives and "the common people." One of these latter, a hawker of fish, called Richard Turner, stood, in a very amusing and unexpected way, sponsor for the society. Richard was fluent of speech, and, if his language was the broadest patois, it was, nevertheless, of the most convincing character. He always spoke well, and, if authorized words failed him, readily coined what he needed. One night while making a very fervent speech, he said: "No half-way measures here. Nothing but the ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old Guy lived with his mother at Etretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where between the sea and the luxuriant country, he grew very fond of nature and out door sports; he went fishing with the fishermen of the coast and spoke patois with the peasants. He was deeply devoted to his mother. He first entered the Seminary of Yvetot, but managed to have himself expelled on account of a peccadillo of precocious poetry. From his early religious education he conserved a marked hostility to Religion. Then he was sent to ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... obscenities that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the separation ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spoken here. There is the purest French and the most atrocious patois. There is polished English, which seems to indicate high education, and there is the most picturesque dialect variation that could be desired by the most ardent devotee of the everlasting dialect story. Spanish is of course spoken by several of the market ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... Thus also he tried to conceal his own mistakes; when a missing letter for which everybody had been anxiously searching was found on his own desk, instead of in the files, he would blare, "Well, why didn't you tell me you put it on my desk, heh?" He was a delayer also and, in poker patois, a passer of the buck. He would feebly hold up a decision for weeks, then make a whole campaign of getting his office to rush through the task in order to catch up; have a form of masculine-commuter hysterics because Una and Bessie didn't do the typing in a ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... spend the evening in rehearsing to a group of the leading men the story of my travels in the canyon country. Of our journey down the canyon in boats they have already heard, and they listen with great interest to what I say. My talk with them is in the Mexican patois, which several of them understand, and all ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... in more languages to the square block than any other area in the world, Babylon included, loves thus to dine linguistically, so to speak. To the Crescent Turkish Restaurant for its Business Men's Lunch comes Fourth Avenue, whose antique-shop patois reads across the page from right to left. Sight-seeing automobiles on mission and commission bent allow Altoona, Iowa City, and Quincy, Illinois, fifteen minutes' stop-in at Ching Ling-Foo's Chinatown Delmonico's. Spaghetti ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... smiling, "and I fear that my English is open to some criticism. I picked it up in the University of Oxford. My friends in the Vatican tell me that it is a patois." ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... curiosities which abound in that remarkable range of hills, and under his guidance we saw many strange things. More than once, he spoke of the existence of a glaciere at no great distance, and talked of taking us to see it; but we were sceptical on the subject, imagining that glaciere was his patois for glacier, and knowing that anything of the glacier kind was out of the question. At last, however, on a hot day in August, we set off with him, armed, at his request, with candles; and, after two or three hours of pine forests, and grass glades, and imaginary paths up rocky ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... gave him an unintelligible answer in the country patois, and passing between them he entered the cottage. On the table stood a large jug of water, and lifting it he took a long draught. There was a sudden crash, and he fell heavily, struck down from behind with a heavy mallet ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... face and the flaxen head appeared, leading that fat ball, Phoebe, and Robin frisking in triumph beside her. Henceforth a great friendship arose between the children. Phoebe soon lost all dread of those who petted her, and favoured them with broad smiles and an incomprehensible patois. Owen made very much of her, and pursued and imitated Robert with the devotion of a small boy to a larger one. Lucilla devoted herself to him for want of better game, and moreover he plainly told her that she was the prettiest little girl he ever saw, and laid all manner of remarkable ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the man-monster who was their master. Bram spoke to them entirely in Eskimo—and the sound of it was like the rapid CLACK—CLACK—CLACK of dry bones striking together. It was weirdly different from the thick and guttural tones Bram used in speaking Chippewyan and the half-breed patois. ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... already 'gone to the Happy Hunting Grounds.' But the Indians had no truer friend, and Kit Carson would wish no prouder epitaph than this. In talking thus he would frequently get his grammar wrong, and his language was only the patois of the Border; but there was an eloquence in his eye, and a pathos in his voice, that would have touched a heart of stone, and a genuine manliness about him at all times, that would have won him hosts of friends anywhere. And so, Kit Carson, good friend, brave heart, generous soul, hail ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... et sans pudeur, Dans son patois de Bourgogne, Bredouillait comme un ivrogne, "Bons ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... wore flaming yellow handkerchiefs about their woolly heads. They were as African as the Congo, and as strange in this setting as Eskimos on Broadway. They felt their importance, for they were of the few good cooks of French dishes here. They spoke a French patois, and guffawed loudly when one dropped her basket of supplies from her head. They were servants of the procureur de la Republique, who had brought them from ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... piece!" Cappy ordered. It is to be regretted that the Bilgewater Club, cut off from the house rules in a private dining room, had a habit of shooting craps occasionally after luncheon, and Cappy Ricks had picked up the patois of the game. "Seventy-five thousand is the limit; but satisfy yourself she's worth the limit before you ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... astonished eyes of the crowd of spectators stood Mr. Gustave Brellier, writhing and twisting in the clutch of the firm fingers and spitting forth fury in a Flemish patois that would have struck Cleek dead on the spot—if words ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... then I should be able to reply like a true friend, and send him away. Consider, dear, it is not like a nobody dangling after a public singer; that is common enough. We are all run after by idle men; even Signorina Zubetta, who has not much voice, nor appearance, and speaks a Genoese patois when she is not delivering a libretto. But for a gentleman of position, with a heart of gold and the soul of an emperor, that he should waste his time and his feelings so, on a woman who can never be anything ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... official language in the Dominion Parliament and in Quebec, but not now in any other province, though documents, etc., may for convenience be published in it. English is understood almost everywhere except in the rural parts of Quebec, where the habitants speak a patois which has preserved many of the ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... been called the miraculous fountain. The girl's name was Fraoise-Melanie Calvat Mathieu, 15 years old, and the boy's Pierre-Maximin Giraud, 11 years old, both employed as cowherds, and both so ignorant that they could neither read nor write. They understood only the patois, and had such frail memories that the girl had as yet been hardly able to remember a few lines of the catechism, while it had taken the boy three years to learn the Pater Noster and the Av Maria. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... my brave man," said old Andregg, in his rough patois; "and I shall be glad to see thee give up this wild mountain life and become ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... rancher's party had to do was plain, i.e. separate, and endeavour, in ones and twos, to pass the rebel lines and enter the Fort. Fortunately they could all speak the curious patois of English, French, and Cree that the enemy used, and therefore they had no need to be at a loss. Moreover, with beaver-skin caps, and long fur coats down to their heels, with the addition of a sash round their waists, they were in no way different ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... ashes, and upset, served for a table to these foreign savages, and was strewn, even at that early hour, with fragments of meat and flasks of wine. They scarcely stirred, they scarcely looked up, as the young noble passed them; and their fierce oaths and loud ejaculations, uttered in a northern patois, grated harsh upon his ear, as he mounted, with a slow step, the lofty and unclean stairs. He came into a vast ante-chamber, which was half-filled with the higher class of the patrician's retainers: some five or six pages, chosen from the inferior ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... any rate, it was the habit of Henri Marais, who was excessively religious, to read his chapter of the Bible (which it is, or was, the custom of the Boers to spell out every morning, should their learning allow them to do so), not in the "taal" or patois Dutch, but in good old French. I have the very book from which he used to read now, for, curiously enough, in after years, when all these events had long been gathered to the past, I chanced to buy it among a parcel of other ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... found the names of Lord and Lady Northmoor, and then, growing more eager as obstructions came in her way, and not liking to turn back as if on a fool's errand, she suggested to Miss Gattoni that questions might be asked about their visit. The Tyrolean patois was far beyond her, and not too comprehensible to her friend, but there was a waiter who could speak French, and the landlady's German ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... me, comprador?" said the man, speaking in that species of Portuguese patois which is so common in the ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... page, but is barred from other columns, its debarment being due to its lack of elegance and clearness. On the sporting page slang has been accepted because there one is writing to a narrow circle of masculine Goths who understand the patois of the gridiron, the diamond, and the padded ropes and prefer it to the language of civilization. But such diction is always limited in its range of acquaintances and followers. A current bit of slang in Memphis may be unintelligible ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... soldier, dropping into patois. "There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we have seen nothing ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... estimate for education in the budget for that year amounted to L63,000, which works thus out at a cost of L8 6s. 1d. per head for the Boer children. Dr. Mansveldt, Head of the Education Department of the Transvaal, a Hollander, seems to have but one aim: to enforce the use of the taal, the Boer patois—a language spoken by no one else—the use of which keeps them in isolated ignorance. The English language ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... estate where I had slept. M. F—- had lately caught a black servant at the brook-side busily washing something in a calabash, and asked him what was he doing there? The conversation would have been held, of course, in French-Spanish-African—Creole patois, a language which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and declensions, etc. A curious book on it has lately been published in Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at once no mean philologer and no mean humorist. The substance ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... singular enough that some important and authentic facts should be found in a Life of Quintianus, composed in rhyme in the old Patois of Rouergue, (Dubos, Hist. Critique, &c., ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... rascality which it is not amiss to mention, and which would have diverted us by its very absurdity, had we not been too tired to find amusement in any thing but supper and beds. In the course of this day and the next, we heard, for the first time, the Provencal patois, which seems a bad compound of French, Spanish, and Italian, with an original gibberish of their own. As far, indeed, as a slight and partial observation enables me to judge, I have been much struck by a similarity which ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the Scandinavian dialect verses are not widely popular, they are at least comparatively fresh and original; and to those readers who can readily grasp the patois, as well as to those who are compelled to struggle painfully through its labyrinths, ...
— The Norsk Nightingale - Being the Lyrics of a "Lumberyack" • William F. Kirk
... the patois of the island, a kind of old Norman French which the young man understood very well. He, therefore, answered ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... Rustic Bard.' His poems were all written in youth or young manhood, (he was little more than a young man when he died.) His collected works in giving everything, are nearly one half first drafts. His brightest hit is his use of the Scotch patois, so full of terms flavor'd like wild fruits or berries. Then I should make an allowance to Burns which cannot be made for any other poet. Curiously even the frequent crudeness, haste, deficiencies, (flatness and puerilities by no means absent) prove upon the whole not out of keeping ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... intelligent fellow as well as our foreman, was privileged to take his meals with us, besides occupying one of our four rooms. In consequence of this we conversed chiefly in the patois French of the country, for the worthy man was not deeply learned in English. Salamander messed with the men in their own house, after preparing and spreading ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... woodman here," he answered in his patois, "under the forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the village here, ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... languages that were drifting into Rome, extending all the limits, removing all the handicaps of the so-called Great Age. He made each person speak his own idiom: the uneducated freedmen, the vulgar Latin argot of the streets; the strangers, their barbarous patois, the corrupt speech of the African, Syrian and Greek; imbecile pedants, like the Agamemnon of the book, a rhetoric of artificial words. These people are depicted with swift strokes, wallowing around tables, exchanging stupid, drunken speech, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... thing I ever heard." The melody was Gaelic, slow and plaintive, and though Maggie gave the English words with her own patois, the beauty and simplicity of the song was by no means injured. "Put by the books, David," said Allan. "I have no heart now for dry-as-dust lessons. Let us speak of Maggie. How is she going to live when ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... seemed to have nothing to do with the pallid face, and the sea-weed, and the hut: they belonged to a different life. As she looked out over the sea, their glance was almost stern, as though demanding something which the sea did not give. But she only remarked to herself, in the island patois:—"I suppose the fish have gone over to the south-west again, and he'll make a night of it. Mackerel is such an aggravating fish, one day here, t'other there—you never know where you'll ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... cause friction, and might spoil all. So, in a few well-chosen words, I informed Tom that there was a trifle between Alf and me; and he was sick, just when I wanted to keep him on his feet for a while. Would Tom (and my patois became so hideously homely that, for the reader's sake, I have to paraphrase it)—would Tom, as a personal favour to me, call round at Alf's camp, morning and evening, for a few days, and in the meantime ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... district of country where my German fashion of speaking French would excite least observation. I thought that Amante herself had something peculiar in her accent, which I had heard M. de la Tourelle sneer at as Norman patois; but I said not a word beyond agreeing to her proposal that we should bend our steps towards Germany. Once there, we should, I thought, be safe. Alas! I forgot the unruly time that was overspreading all Europe, overturning all law, and all the ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... driver give more cheering halloo to four-footed beast! or with spirit more elate, deliver in the drawling patois of his native paesi, some ditty commemorative of Northern liberty! Honest Pietro! thy wishes were contained within a small compass! thy little brown cur, snarling and bandy-legged—thy raw-boned steeds—these ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... unknown as forks and dishes among the gens de chantier; a large pot of tea, dipped into by everybody's pannikin, served for beer and wine; pork was the piece de resistance, and tobacco-smoking the dessert; during all of which a Babel of tongues went on in French patois, intermingled with an occasional remark in Irish ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... showing of the bewilderment into which the poor Creoles were thrown as to who their governors really were. It requests "their Sovereign Lords," [Footnote: "Nos Souverains Seigneurs." The letter is ill-written and worse spelt, in an extraordinary French patois. State Department MSS., No. 30, page 459. It is dated December 3, 1782. Many of the surnames attached are marked with a cross; others are signed. Two are given respectively as "Bienvenus fils" and "Blouin fils."] whether of the Congress of the United States or of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... I will pay for it," said Bouvier du Bouchet, a rich farmer who was present, "and if you do not I will eat what is left and you shall pay for it." [Footnote: This sentence is patois, and the translator inserts the original. "Sez vosu meze, z'u payo, repondit Bouvier du Bouchet, gros fermier qui se trouvait present; e sez vos caca en rotaz, i-zet vo ket paire et ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... divine dignity of human nature. Great poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls "the seemly raiment of cultured speech" than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as "The Northern Farmer," it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the dialect, but because he used ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... sailor, who had fought his way from the forecastle to the quarter-deck. Indignant at Dumanoir's conduct, he had early in the battle given orders to steer for the thickest of it. "Lou capo sur lou 'Bucentaure'!" ("Head her for the 'Bucentaure'!") he shouted in his native patois. He arrived too late to fight for victory, but he fought for the honour of his flag. After engaging several British ships, Infernet struck to the "Orion." An officer of the "Conqueror" (which had ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... PATOIS.—G. The great impediment to popular instruction in France, is the multiplicity of patois, and the tenacity of the peasantry for them. The same objection exists to the use of so many Indian dialects ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and lightning and blazes! Haid homa gfresa beim Herr Doll. Das is a deutscha Compositor, und a browa Mo. [Footnote: "Today we dined with Herr Doll, he is a good composer and a worthy man" [Vienna Patois]] Now I begin to describe my course of life.—Alle 9 ore, qualche volta anche alle dieci mi svelgio, e poi andiamo fuor di casa, e poi pranziamo da un trattore, e dopo pranzo scriviamo, e poi sortiamo, e indi ceniamo, ma che cosa? Al giorno di grasso, un mezzo pollo ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... his Latin. During a shorter exile, Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Galt's novels; sometimes of the perorations ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... is done by steam. Starting from the engine room at the bottom, the visitor next enters the receiving room, where early in the morning the chattering, patois-speaking natives come to deliver the flowers for the supply of which they have contracted. The next room is occupied with a number of steam-jacketed pans, a mill, and hydraulic presses. Next comes the still room, the stills in which are all heated by steam. In the "extract" department, which is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... copiously spread over the Continent. You find them from Trondjhem to Athens, from Nishni to Cadiz, seldom far from the beaten track, never under breeched escort. They speak three popular languages fluently, and usually know some out-of-the-way tongue such as Gaelic or Albanian or a Czech patois. This one seemed quite at home with Mallorquin. They generally display the bare left third finger of the maiden; but even when that critical digit is gold-fettered, you are not always satisfied that they have ever called man husband. ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... do, then," retorted Grosvenor; "never was more serious in my life. Listen! Yes, I feel sure I was not mistaken; it is a sort of Hebrew patois that he is speaking, Hebrew, mixed up, it is true, with a number of words that I can make nothing of. Still, I can understand enough of what he is saying to make out that he is giving his fellows orders to drive in our oxen and yoke them to the wagon. You know I went in rather strongly ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... their sense at the same time; and, being philosophers without knowing it, keep the measure of their desires in accordance with the brevity of life. I approach a much-patronised tavern, and see inscribed above the entrance this quatrain in Neopolitan patois: ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... were barely able to understand the language of their guests, whom they persisted in generalizing as "cannie Soothrons;" while the guests, on their part, could not altogether arrive at the meaning of observations that were couched in the most incomprehensible patois that was ever invented. It was "neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring," although it was flavoured with the Northumbrian burr, and mixed with a species of Scotch; and the historian of these pages would feel almost as much difficulty in setting down this north-Northumbrian dialect, as he ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... in lieu of a cooking fire Cuthbert set up his little "Juwel" kerosene stove, and in less than ten minutes had water boiling furiously, when he could make a big pot of coffee, the remarks in French patois were almost wholly favorable to the little brass contraption, as both the Americans knew; for these fellows recognized how handy such an affair must prove on a wet day when it was almost impossible ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... it, the man comes from some remote part of the country, and speaks a villainous patois that even an educated person of his own land can scarcely make out. He is very ignorant, and slow to pick up ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... with the curved roof became his favourite playground. It was near the river, and Fiddlin' Jack was always ready to make a boat for him, or help him catch minnows in the mill-dam. The child had a taste for music, too, and learned some of the old Canadian songs, which he sang in a curious broken patois, while his delighted teacher accompanied him on the violin. But it was a great day when he was eight years old, and Jacques brought out a small fiddle, for which he had secretly sent to Albany, and ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... on their journey to the north. They had consulted with Rosalie how they were to proceed, and they thought with her that they might make their way dressed as country lads from some place in the south of France where a patois was spoken scarcely known in the north; that he, Paul, was to act as spokesman, and that O'Grady was to pretend to be deaf and dumb. As a reason for their journey, Paul was to state that their father was a sailor, and that they had heard he was lying wounded at some place on ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... gentleman of his race, was the son of a mulatto slave of Emilier Caramouche. He was born in 1850, but appears vigorous. Light skinned, with blue eyes and a genial expression, he gave the story of his life in the French patois spoken by Louisiana French Negroes, which has been translated ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... and a sweet-faced old lady timorously thrust her head out of an upper window. She apparently had been hiding away terror-stricken, and there was something pathetic in the half-trusting way she risked her fate even now. In a low voice she put some question in the local patois to me. I could not understand what she was asking, but concluded that she was seeking comfort and assurance. So I sought to convey by much gesturing and benevolent smiling that all was quiet and safe along the Meuse. She may have concluded that I was some harmless, roaming ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... Pierre. Of an inquiring turn of mind, the French half-breed desired to know concerning the history of these English people, who, being poor, were yet gentle, and spoke French with a grace and accent which was to the French-Canadian patois as Shakespeare's English is to that of Seven Dials. Pierre's methods of inquisitiveness were not strictly dishonest. He did not open letters, he did not besiege dispatch-boxes, he did not ask impudent questions; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 'S IST LANGE HER, the German version of Auld Lang Syne; so you see, madame, the finest lyric ever written will make its way out of whatsoever corner of patois it found its ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... throats!" (This was the name which they had given to the Calvinists.) "Three cheers for the white cockade! Before we are done, it will be red with the blood of the Protestants!" However, on the 5th of May they ceased to wear it, replacing it by a scarlet tuft, which in their patois they called the red pouf, which was immediately ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seldom sought in vain; nor did it fail us now. Old and young, matron and maid, they all sallied forth to lend a hand, and, with such laughing and screaming as is apt to attend feminine efforts, enabled us to launch the boat. In spite of their patois of bad Portuguese, we contrived to establish a mutual understanding. A fine, tall girl, with a complexion of deep olive, clear, large eyes, and teeth beautifully white and even, stood by my side; and, like the Ancient Mariner and his sister's son, we pulled together. She was ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... chicken business, after one week spent in pursuit of that knowledge through every weird magazine and state agricultural bulletin in the public library, even you could learn, Matthew Berry, with your lack of sympathy with the great American wealth producer, the humble female chicken known in farmer patois as a hen. Did you know that it only costs about two dollars and thirteen cents to feed a hen a whole year and that she will produce twenty-seven dollars and a half for her owner, the darling thing? I know I'll just love her when I get to ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... speak patois in England?' I was once asked; and when I told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the patois spoken in China, meaning business-English, pigeon being the ordinary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... guarded by unknown forces that lies between conscious life and the sleep that is so close of kin to death. If in full possession of her senses, she might not have caught the drift of the sentence, since it was spoken in a guttural patois. But now she understood beyond cavil that because she had opened her eyes, the girl was giving thanks to the Deity. The first definite though bewildering notion that perplexed her faculties, at once clouded and unnaturally clear, was ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... wouldn't," I told him. "He's speaking a sort of patois, you see. He wants to know if you will have the great kindness to drop anchor alongside him until morning, for it is forbidden to pass through the mine-fields in the dark, and he hopes that you will have ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... Savoyard, in his touching patois, still smiling, and holding out his little hand; therein I dropped a small coin. The boy evinced his gratitude by a new turn of ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Badger were singled out to act as interpreters. But Burton had quarrelled with Badger about something or other; so when they approached the Sultan, Burton began addressing him, not in Arabic, but in the Zanzibar patois. The Sultan, after some conversation, turned to Badger, who, poor man, not being conversant with the patois, could only stand still in the dunce's cap which Burton, as it were, had clapped on him and look extremely foolish; while the bystanders nodded to each other ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Austrians were brave boors, who spoke nothing but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border dialect, which nothing but barbarism had ever heard of, and which nothing but Austrian organs could have ever pronounced. The French recruits were from provinces which had their own "beloved patois," and which, to the Parisian, held nearly the same rank of civilized respect as the Kingdom of Ashantee. Besides, it was to be remembered, that all round me was a scene of suffering—the dismal epilogue of a field of battle; or rather ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... by the peculiarity of the dialect which Mrs. Baliol used. It was Scottish—decidedly Scottish—often containing phrases and words little used in the present day. But then her tone and mode of pronunciation were as different from the usual accent of the ordinary Scotch PATOIS, as the accent of St. James's is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... when this scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and most of all—a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition—I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock- you-down' order; some sweet, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... and where I was going; and he was so much pleased with my destination, that he desired to know my name; and this I told him with all the injunction of secrecy I could convey; but he could no more pronounce it than I could speak his name. It occurred to me that perhaps he spoke a French patois, and I asked him; but he only shook his head. He would own neither to German nor Irish. The happy thought came to me of inquiring if he knew English. But he shook his head again, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the hired nurses, but which will not be much of a marvel to you if you have read medical philosophy much. It is this: his lost memory returns to him when he is delirious, and goes away again when he is himself-just as old Canada Joe used to talk the French patois of his boyhood in the delirium of typhus fever, though he could not do it when his mind was clear. Now this poor gentleman's memory has always broken down before he reached the explosion of the steamer; he could only remember starting up the river ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... talking to an old woman who brought us strawberries, I was surprised to hear her pronounce the Italian proverb, "Poco a poco fa lontano nel giorno." I thought she must have been beyond the Alps—no, she had never been out of her own mountains. The patois of these people is very agreeable—a mixture of the Italian fond diminutives and accents on the last syllable— ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the driver, and he uttered a few words in a patois that was probably a composition of Dutch and Hottentot, which made the little yellow flat-nosed driver come shambling up, grinning, to take the big whip pitched to him and go off to a distance of some five-and-twenty yards, where, after uttering a few incomprehensible cries which had the ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... arms. In the half light he might have been a huge animal, a hulking creature of some sort walking upright. Carrigan's fingers closed more tightly on the butt of his automatic. The woman began to talk swiftly in a patois of French and Cree. David caught the gist of it. She was telling Bateese to carry him to the canoe, and to be very careful, because m'sieu was badly hurt. It was his head, she emphasized. Bateese must be careful ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... especially is this genial civility to be admired and noticed at the railway-stations and in the carriages. You never hear English spoken except among a few officials, and a knowledge of French is the first necessity of life here. Unhappily, there is a patois in use among the creoles and other natives which is very confusing. It is made up of a strange jumble of Eastern languages, grafted on a debased kind of French, and gabbled with the rapidity of lightning and a great deal of gesticulation. At a ball you hear far more French than ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... were their sweethearts. In those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes, and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were kind-hearted ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... country is French. Everybody speaks it—has to. You have to know French particularly mongrel French, the patois spoken by Tom, Dick, and Harry of the multiform ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you have me do, Senor Rufino?" he asks in a patois of Spanish, which many Chaco Indians can speak; himself better than common, from his long and frequent intercourse with Halberger's family. ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Nature gives to her nearest of kin and her dearest,—her honey-lovers—her insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever occurred to the childish fancy of this strange race; but there is a creole expression which first suggested it to me;—in the patois, pouend gupe, "to catch a wasp," signifies making love to a pretty colored girl. ... And the more one observes these costumes, the more one feels that only Nature could .have taught such rare comprehension of powers and harmonies among colors,—such ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... parlant entre eux un rude patois cvenol auquel je n'entendais rien, ils me harent tout de suite, sans me connatre. J'tais pour eux l'ennemi, le Pion; et du jour o je m'assis dans ma chaire, ce fut la guerre entre nous, une guerre acharne, sans trve, de tous ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... dictate with admirable skill the plan of a libretto. His own voice was of the harshest and most inharmonious texture; but by his advice and instructions he formed some of the first singers in Italy. His language was a Milanese patois; but he found means to make himself excellently understood by the kings and emperors, with whom he carried on negotiations upon a footing of perfect equality. It was a great treat to see him seated in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... Nikky's fierce lip, and other things, had got in their work. The man on the ground stopped muttering in his patois, and turned on Nikky eyes ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he has lost his gayety, his spirit, his confidence in his fortune, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... much for to-night, I fancy," said the aid-de-camp, wondering if a promenade au clair de la lune or a carriage ride to Ferney would be possible! He already had noted the purity of the French accent of the fair unknown. No guttural Swiss patois there, but that crisp elegance of tone which promised him a flirtation en ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... is remarkable when the long period of isolation of the country and the extended duration of Haitian rule are considered. In this particular Haiti offers a contrast, for though French is the official language the mass of the people speak Creole French, a patois unintelligible to anyone who has not lived in Haiti. The Dominicans do not lisp the "c" as do the Spaniards, and other peculiarities of Spanish as spoken in America are manifest, but on the whole the difference between the Dominican's Spanish and the ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... like a sprite, drawing her cap over her face. Ah, the familiar ways and sights, the stores here, the booths shut, for the outdoors trade was mostly over, the mingled French and English, the patois, the shouts to the horses and dogs and to the pedestrians to get out of the way. She glanced up St. Anne's street, she passed the barrack, where some soldiers sat in the sunshine cleaning up their accouterments. Children were playing games, as the space was wider here. The door of the ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... alone, immigrating into these sections of Louisiana, so far as the language, manners, and customs of the people were concerned, were going into a foreign land. The language of the entire population was French, or a patois, as the European French term it—a provincialism which a Parisian finds it difficult to understand. The ignorance and squalid poverty of these people put their society entirely out of the question, even if their ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... is essentially the classic French of the time of Henry IV. The dialect or patois of Saintonge, his native province, was probably understood and spoken by him; but we have not discovered any influence of it in his writings, either in respect to idiom or vocabulary. An occasional appearance at court, and his constant official intercourse ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... that keeps green and beautiful the year round that section of Louisiana which was first settled by the exiled Acadians and made famous in Longfellow's "Evangeline," is a thriving village. In the patois of the country the people are called "Cajians," a corruption of Acadians. As a rule, they are non-progressive and ignorant. But the spirit of modern progress, brought in on the railroad, is putting new ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... purple curtain of the Pyrenees had been drawn behind, us, and we were passing from the patois of Languedoc to the patois of Provence, where the peasants say pardie in place of pardou when an exclamation of surprise comes ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield |
