"Patois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me. He has sat many a time on that very chair which you are occupying. There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see. Excuse me." Here he turned round as if he was addressing somebody, and began rapidly speaking a language unknown to me. "It is Arabic," he said; "a bad patois I own. I learned it in Barbary, when I was a prisoner amongst the Moors. In anno 1609, bin ick aldus ghekledt gheghaen. Ha! you doubt me: look at me well. At least I ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lovely evening in autumn, as the Dover steam-boat rounded the wooden pier at Calais, amid a fleet of small boats filled with eager and anxious faces, soliciting, in every species of bad English and "patois" [vulgar] French, the attention and patronage of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... is full of interesting folks. The patois of the garage is used with full comic and realistic effect, and effervescently, culminating in the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... encouraging, the man put in in his patois, for they had been greatly disturbed by rumors among the country-folk and many ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... French, interspersed with words of an uncouth patois, which I ascribed to long residence ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... Graefin's pardon," I mumbled out in the thick patois of the Rhine which I had learnt at Bonn, "I served with the Herr Graf in Galicia, and I thought maybe ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... Steiermark, was chosen for the holidays; and the place, the people, and the life delighted Fleeming. He worked hard at German, which he had much forgotten since he was a boy; and what is highly characteristic, equally hard at the patois, in which he learned to excel. He won a prize at a Schutzen-fest; and though he hunted chamois without much success, brought down more interesting game in the shape of the Styrian peasants, and in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much of ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dishevelment accorded well with the general look of the house; her slippers clicked on the carpetless boards at every shuffling step, and she carried a half-cold, slopped-over cup of coffee. To Arithelli's relief the woman was mistress of a limited amount of French patois, and in answer to a demand for a wardrobe of some kind, said she would send up her son. He was a carpenter and would doubtless arrange something. She gave a curious glance at the girl's witch-like beauty, a mixture of suspicion and barely-admitted ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... masculine strength. The aid of woman, however, is 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 ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... 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
... 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 ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... 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 ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... those Americans speaking English 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 language had been comprehensible. They were amiable, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... to night, as my 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stupor, with somewhat stertorous breathing; this lasts about a minute or two; then, all at once, she comes out of the stupor with a burst of words. Her voice is changed; she is no longer Mrs Piper, but another personage, Dr Phinuit, who speaks in a loud, masculine voice in a mingling of negro patois, French, and ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... to him because he almost immediately perceived that he was the subject of conversation. It seemed odd to stand so near them and not understand a word they said. He heard enough now to know the language they were speaking was the patois that, in those parts, is the descendant of the Jersey French. These men, then, were Acadians—the boy also, for he gabbled freely to them. Either they had sinister designs on him, or he was an obstruction to some purpose that ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... They had known many of those men before. They 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 little ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... remember we met two women, dressed in the quaint costume common to that part of the country, each carrying a basket of eggs. I stopped the carriage and endeavored to enter into conversation with the pair, but could not understand a word of their patois. I then took a couple of eggs, handed out a silver franc piece, and drove on, leaving two astonished women standing in the road, gazing alternately at the piece of money and at the back of my carriage. Arriving at the station I ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Mouci,"[5] said the poor Nabob, trying to jest, and resorting to the sabir patois to remind his old chum of all the pleasant reminiscences they had overhauled the day before. "Our visit to Le Merquier still holds. The picture we were going to offer him, you know. What day ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... 'Estelle'—perhaps his best work. The singer of the Gardon entirely bewitched Jasmin. 'Estelle' allured him into the rosy-fingered regions of bliss and happiness. Then Jasmin himself began to rhyme. Florian's works encouraged him to write his first verses in the harmonious Gascon patois, to which he afterwards ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... imitate Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he "caught on to" as he would not have grasped provincial development of Spanish ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... they 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 the French ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... way to Charleroi, after passing through Mons, they traversed the great Belgium iron and coal country, where the people speak a patois but understand French. Here they made a free distribution of the religious tracts they had taken with them, and found an able co-adjutor in their postillion. When he understood what their object was, he allowed few opportunities to pass ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... themselves often spoke it after a fashion. At 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 works at ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... France, however, I found the jargon or patois spoken generally by the natives to differ so materially from the purer forms as set forth in this work that perforce I had recourse to a small manual containing, in parallel columns, sentences in ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the landing and putting passengers ashore in the small boats that ranged themselves near the steamer. There was a very bedlam of chatter, argument, and recrimination among the black boatmen, mounting at times to furious invective in a patois we failed wholly to understand, for though the majority of the natives speak English on all the islands, whether Dutch, French, or British, they use a language of their own vintage on these undress occasions. I could see Dolly's bright head and laughing ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... feast. Hand in hand the runners, followed as before by all their companions, returned to join in the dance now to take place before the house of Dr. Mayor. After a time the festivities were interrupted by a little address in patois from the first musician, who concluded by announcing from his platform a special dance in honor of the family of Dr. Mayor. In this dance the family with some of their friends and neighbors took part,—the young ladies dancing with the peasant lads and the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... been a 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, in which ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a relation of the guide's. Paoli was a tall man with a slight cough, and the melancholy look of a consumptive; he showed them their room, a miserable-looking chamber built of stone, but which was handsome for this country, where no refinement is known. He was expressing in his Corsican patois (a mixture of French and Italian) his pleasure at receiving them, when a clear voice interrupted him, and a dark little woman, with big black eyes, a sun-kissed skin, and a slender waist, hurried forward, kissed Jeanne, shook Julien by the hand and said: "Good-day, madame; good-day, monsieur; ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... moment place an inflectional on a level with an isolating and a combinatory language. Acompound such as the Sanskrit go-duh, cow-milking, differs little, if at all, from the Chinese nieou-jou, vacc lac, or in the patois of Canton, ngau , cow-milk, before it takes the terminations of the nominative, which is, of ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... 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
... 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, this volume is ...
— The Norsk Nightingale - Being the Lyrics of a "Lumberyack" • William F. Kirk
... 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to the hospital every day with the English papers, and looked in to leave me the Mirror, for which he would never accept any payment. He had very few teeth and talked in an indistinct sort of patois and insisted on holding long conversations in consequence! He told me he would be enchante to bring me some novels bien choisis par ma femme (well chosen by my wife) one day, and in due course they ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... 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 clothing. The animal rubbed ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... of the 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
... "Rotten patois some of these people speak," he said. "I believe she has a room, though something's biting her. Likely enough Fritz went off with all her furniture; but I've already explained twenty times that that doesn't matter. Ecoutez, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... his temples, which, escaping from his shako, hung down to his chest, and with all this an air...! An air of rakishness which was increased by his speech, which was rattled out in a sort of Franco-Alsatian patois. This last did not surprise my father, as he knew that the 1st Hussars were the former regiment of Bercheny, which in earlier days recruited only Germans, and where, until 1793, all the orders were given in German, which was the language generally ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... started with fair weather, and in high spirits. The guide, with the gentlemen's plaids strapped together, led the way cheerily, occasionally talking his vile patois with Julian and Mr Kennedy, or laughing heartily at Cyril's "bad language"—for Cyril, not being strong in German, exercised a delightful ingenuity in making a very few words go a very long way. Kennedy walked generally with Eva and Violet, while Julian often joined them, and Cyril, always ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... 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 with his wife and child, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... thought we might return to that 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 ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... Lombardy and came to Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing mountain- torrents ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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 ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... was not exactly London slang, but a patois or dialect, learned partly from her husband, partly from her companions, and ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... exceptional captain, and the crew were a picked crew, ruddy faced, sandy whiskered for the most part, Englishmen all, honest, hardy fellows from between the Nore and the Wash, talking in an honest provincial patois, dashed with sea slang. They were the very pink and pattern of cleanliness, and the Cayman herself from stem to stern was dazzling and spotless to ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... monsieur," said she, rising as she spoke, and gathering her cloak about her; and Garnache remarked that her voice had the southern drawl, her words the faintest suggestion of a patois. It was amazing how a lady born and bred could degenerate in the rusticity of Dauphiny. Pigs and cows, he made no doubt, had been her chief objectives. Yet, even so, he thought he might have expected that she would have had more to say ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... it was that her husband, an honest free trader between Italy and Switzerland, should have been destroyed by the slaves in the government vessels beneath, and Jenny nodded and strove to understand. She was making progress in Italian, though Assunta's swift tongue and local patois were as yet beyond her comprehension. But she knew that her dead smuggler husband was the subject on Assunta's ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... is, and ever will be, Napoleon. Speak that name and the native's eye will fire and his patois will rattle forth and tingle the ear like a snare-drum. Though he pays his tithe to France, he is Italian; but unlike the Italian of Italy, his predilection is neither for gardening, nor agriculture, nor horticulture. Nature gave him a few chestnuts, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... 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 to ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... a little surprised at being addressed in the Patois dialect of the Basques in my own country, which is spoken about Bayonne and other parts adjacent to the Pyrenees. To their questions I answered, that I was the only survivor of the crew of a whaler, which had been frozen up in the ice, during the winter; that she had filled with water, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fear that a shorter exile might have affected the 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the broad German 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
... earth as their bed, and the canopy of heaven as their roof; but when 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 to find dry wood to burn, and some warm drink was needed ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... were pouring off the boat now, and through the crowd came the tall Frenchman, bearing in the hollow of each arm a child who clasped a bundle to its breast. His eyes grew brighter at sight of Necia, and he broke into a flood of patois; they fairly bombarded each other with quick questions and fragmentary answers till she remembered her companion, who had fallen back a pace and was studying the newcomer, whereupon ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... 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 ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... He has 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, ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... feasible than I had at first supposed. Beppo had asked the count's permission to bring with him a brother accustomed to the sea, and who wished to quit England. I might personate that brother. You know that the Italian language, in most of its dialects and varieties of patois—Genoese, Piedmontese, Venetian—is as familiar tome as Addison's English! Alas! rather more so. Presto! the thing was settled. I felt my heart, from that moment, as light as a feather, and my sense ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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
... remote and unfrequented parts. When Fontanini informs us[BL] that the ancient Romance is now spoken in the country of the Grisons, he adds, that it is also the common dialect of the Friulese, and of some districts in Savoy bordering upon Dauphine. And Rivet[BM] seriously undertakes to prove, that the Patois of several parts of the Limousin, Quercy, and Auvergne (which in fact agrees singularly with the Romansh of the Grisons) is the very Romance of eight centuries ago. Neither do I doubt, but what some inquisitive traveller might still meet with manifest traces of it in ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... church, that makes some look askance at the distinctions, and honours, and revenues, which, taken from no person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive, evangelic poverty, which, in the spirit, ought always to exist in them (and in us too, however we may like it), but ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... 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 that I ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... with the Spanish 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, ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... 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
... might like a turn at frogging, and Josef, 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 ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... of sudden terror she pointed to the hallway, and laid her finger upon her lip. And then, in a hoarse whisper, the woman told, in her patois, broken with sobs, of the alternate spells of fainting and exhaustion which had brought Irma ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... 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
... Struggling horses, grappling at the ice-bound floor with sharp-spiked shoes; huge, hoarse drivers, some clad in sheepskins from Italian valleys, some brown as bears in rough Graubuenden homespun; casks, dropping their spilth of red wine on the snow; greetings, embracings; patois of Bergamo, Romansch, and German roaring around the low-browed vaults and tingling ice pillars; pourings forth of libations of the new strong Valtelline on breasts and beards;—the whole made up a scene of stalwart jollity and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... in the room, it was impossible they could converse together without betraying the secret of their country, and, as a result of this, the falsehood of the character under which they appeared. Long residence in the country had, it is true, rendered the patois of that class of people whom they personated familiar to one, but the other spoke only the pure and native language of which it was a corruption. It might have occurred to them at a cooler moment, and under less critical circumstances, that, even if their disguise had been ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... needed—among the 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 ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... thus appealed to was the Englishman's second-in-command; he acted as interpreter when anything out of the common was required. He muttered a few words in the Hispano-Indian patois which his hearers best understood, and the scene in the saloon changed with wondrous suddenness. The glow of the electric lamps banished the gathering shadows. The luxurious comfort of the apartment soon dispelled the notion of danger. Coffee was brought. The smoking saloon ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... are descendants of the ones my father brought North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You notice that they've lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We bring a few of them up to speak English—my secretary and two or three ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sweet echoes of the dear home-voices, Each note of which calls like a little sister, Those airs slow, slow ascending, as the smoke-wreaths Rise from the hearthstones of our native hamlets, Their music strikes the ear like Gascon patois!. . . (The old man seats himself, and gets his flute ready): Your flute was now a warrior in durance; But on its stem your fingers are a-dancing A bird-like minuet! O flute! Remember That flutes were made of reeds first, not ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... trousers, or leathern leggins, moccasins of deer-skin, and a belt of variegated worsted, from which are suspended the knife, tobacco-pouch, and other implements. Their language is of the same piebald character, being a French patois, embroidered with Indian ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... perfume factory everything 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. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... and ceremony. Their appearance was altogether horrible, they wore leather aprons, which were sprinkled all over with blood, they had large horse pistols in their belts, and a dirk and sabre by their sides. Their looks were full of ferocity, and they spoke a harsh dissonant patois language. Over their cups, they talked about the bloody business of that day's occupation, in the course of which they drew out their dirks, and wiped from their handles, clots of blood and hair. Madame O—— sat with them, undismayed ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... the first "prophets" who appeared was Isabel Vincent, a young shepherdess of Crest, in Dauphiny, who could neither read nor write. Her usual speech was the patois of her country, but when she became inspired she spoke perfectly, and, according to Michelet, with great eloquence. "She chanted," he says, "at first the Commandments, then a psalm, in a low and fascinating voice. She meditated a moment, then began the lamentation of the Church, tortured, exiled, ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... 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 by such numbers of petty tribes. Pity these were not ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... patois spoken in China, meaning business-English, pigeon being the ordinary Chinese ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... 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 descending the Matterhorn after having made ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... 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 statues of the children in the path between ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... shouted 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 ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... (Vol. viii., p. 478.).—Nieder Deutsch, or rather Neder Duitsch, is the proper name of the Dutch language; at least it is that which the people of Holland give to it. Low German does not necessarily mean a vulgar patois. It is essentially as different a language from High German, or rather more so, as Spanish is from Portuguese. I believe German purists would point out Holstein, Hanover, Brunswick (not Dresden), as the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... rough, the sun is hot, and a fat Jewess becomes sea-sick. An Italian Jew rails at the boatmen ahead, in the Neapolitan patois, for the distance is long, the Quarantine being on the land-side of Beyrout. We see the rows of little yellow houses on the cliff, and with great apparent risk of being swept upon the breakers, are tugged into a small cove, where there is a landing-place. ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... moment; for 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... shown in the best passages of his Noctes eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles—his inordinate and stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his irritable temper, and the rest—give a false air of identity which is very noteworthy. The third portrait is said ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and 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 ever ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... is 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... felt at home, and that was at the Soiree Suisse, which takes place annually in London, where pretty Helvetian damsels brew the most fragrant coffee and hand round delicious little cakes, arrayed as they are in their killing national costume and chattering in a dozen different patois. I had a notion that tea at Kensal New Town would be very much less eligible, so I stopped away. Perhaps I was prejudiced. The tea might have been different from what I expected. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... remainder 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 ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... their arms, and at their skirts, hung in a sullen group back of her. A crowd of dejected, hungry, gaunt men stood to one side, and one very old man had his old woolen cap off his white head, which I could see was bowed in prayer. In a moment I knew from their Flemish patois, which I had heard so often out in the fields of beautiful Belgium during that happy month just before the war, that they were refugees, and my heart went out in a rush to them as I went in a rush to ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... English in its present state. The present state of the English is, of course, not any one of its prior states. So first let it be remarked that it is highly probable that what may have been the best of English once may now by some be counted as a weak, inconsequent patois, or dialect. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... very chair which you are now occupying. There are several spirits in the room now, whom you cannot see. Excuse me." Here he turned round as if he was addressing somebody, and began rapidly speaking a language unknown to me. "It is Arabic," he said; "a bad patois, I own. I learned it in Barbary, when I was a prisoner among the Moors. In anno 1609, bin ick aldus ghekledt gheghaen. Ha! you doubt me: look at me well. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... &c. &c. Bayley is anxious to treat for a course of lessons in the purest Irish. None but such as will conceal a West Indian patois will be of the slightest use. For particulars, and cards to view, apply to Mr. Catnach, Music and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... the man told me, as his Spanish was none of the best, and he mixed it up with a patois which I only half understood. However, the outline of the story was plain enough, and will take but ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... 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
... voir le Saut de lou Contrabandiste?" said he, in the barbarous dialect of the district, half French, half patois, with a small dash ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... senses, and my sixth sense above all. One look at his square bulldog jaw, his massive neck and the deformity of his delicate hands and feet! I hear the ignorant patois of the East Side underworld. I smell the brimstone in his suppressed rage at my dislike. There's something uncanny in the sensuous droop of his heavy eyelids and the glitter of his steel-blue eyes. There's something incongruous in his whole ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... who was now within a dozen yards, were already exchanging words in a patois not unlike the Limousin dialect, of which Conyngham ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the voices collect near the spot where the white man had so reluctantly abandoned his rifle. Amid the jargon of Indian dialects that he now plainly heard, it was easy to distinguish not only words, but sentences, in the patois of the Canadas. A burst of voices had shouted simultaneously, "La Longue Carabine!" causing the opposite woods to re-echo with a name which, Heyward well remembered, had been given by his enemies to a celebrated ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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. "What ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... to the people, had escaped mutilation. I entered into conversation, to ascertain whether true German was not possible to them, since they must needs read and write the language; but, although they understood me, they could only partly, and with evident difficulty, lay aside their own patois. I found this to be the case everywhere throughout the Canton. It is a circumstance so unusual, that, in spite of myself, associating a rude dialect with ignorance, I was always astonished when those who spoke it showed culture and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... valuable hints, and 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 box at San Carlo, opposite that of the King of Naples, on the evening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... somewhat bent, with the mournful air of a consumptive. He took them to their room, a cheerless room of bare stone, but handsome for this country, where all elegance is ignored. He expressed in his language—the Corsican patois, a jumble of French and Italian—his pleasure at welcoming them, when a shrill voice interrupted him. A little swarthy woman, with large black eyes, a skin warmed by the sun, a slender waist, teeth always showing in a perpetual smile, darted ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... on 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 ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... continent where she once thought to reign supreme, France has been able to 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 ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... was 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 the strength of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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 ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... said the 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
... created for them, created with them, often 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
... 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 the ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... as I heard the babble of strange tongues about me and saw the picturesque costumes of the habitans, so unlike anything I had ever seen in Philadelphia or Kentucky. Negroes were chattering their queer creole patois, and Indians of many nations were gathered into groups, some of them bedizened with the cheap finery of the stores, some of them wearing only bright-hued blankets, but with wonderful head-dresses ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... 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 ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... Genevieve, in the house of the mother of Pretty 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 ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... both the wine and the fruit. Their wine, when distilled, yields but one-third its quantity in brandy. The wages of a laboring man here are five louis; of a woman, one half. The women do not work with the hoe: they only weed the vines, the corn, &c, and spin. They speak a patois very difficult to understand. I passed some time at the Chateau de Laye-Epinaye. Monsieur de Laye has a seignory of about fifteen thousand arpents, in pasture, corn, vines, and wood. He has over this, as is usual, a certain jurisdiction, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... discredit that two clans have arisen: the liberal, which prunes naturalism of all its boldness of subject matter and diction in order to fit it for the drawing-room, and the decadent, which gets completely off the ground and raves incoherently in a telegraphic patois intended to represent the language of the soul—intended rather to divert the reader's attention from the author's utter lack of ideas. As for the right wing verists, I can only laugh at the frantic puerilities of these would-be psychologists, who have ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... anchored an hour or so, a bumboat came out, manned by a crew of two coal-black negroes who spoke a French patois, intermingled with comical English. The boat itself was a queer, stubby craft propelled by home-made oars. Before the morning was well advanced the ship was surrounded by boats carrying shells, limes, prickly pears, green cocoanuts, bananas, fish, and ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... "3. This would be finer in an ode than in actual reality. I disturb myself very little about what the Dutch and English say, the rather as I understand nothing of those dialects (PATOIS) of theirs. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... permission was finished, and he set out for his hazardous post once more, great was the lamenting. Madame wept. All the brave man's relatives poured in to kiss him good-bye. The departing soldier wept, himself. Even Grand'mere desisted for that day from cracking jokes, which she was always doing in a patois that to Talbot ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... companions was a young French officer and an eccentric, garrulous doctor from America. At Tonneins, on the Garonne, they entered a house where a number of girls were quilting. The girls gave Irving a needle and set him to work. He could not understand their patois, and they could not comprehend his bad French, and they got on very merrily. At last the little doctor told them that the interesting young man was an English prisoner whom the French officer had in custody. Their merriment at once gave place to pity. "Ah! le pauvre garcon!" ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... in New Jersey as well as at the South, although in less numbers. Gladys's mother was rather a marvel, inasmuch as she was willing to take in washing, and do it well too, but Gladys had no higher rank for that. She was herself rather a pathetic little soul, dingily pretty, using the patois of her kind, and always at the fag end of her classes. Her education, so far, seemed to meet with no practical results in the child herself. Her brain merely filtered learning like a sieve; but she thought Maria Edgham was a wonder, and it was really through ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sais!" she repeated, in the patois of the Normand peasant, lifting her riding crop in warning to the ball of fluff who had refused to get on his chair and ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... King's Theatre. I trust it is no heresy to say that I am somewhat sceptical as to the powers of euphoniacal criticism which that audience possesses. If one in ten, even of the box company, can really distinguish the true bocca romana from the patois of the Venetian gondolieri or the Neapolitan lazzaroni, it is, I am persuaded, as much as the truth will justify. In fact it is not the audience that is so critical: it is the associated band of foreign parasites who attach themselves to our aristocracy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... was my way of putting it," Thad went on to say; "I meant that as near as I could guess they seem to be Canadian half-breeds, for some of their talk was in a French patois I couldn't just understand. And I've always heard that those kind of men are mighty hard to handle, because, like Italians they get furiously excited, and let their imaginations run away with them, like some other ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter
... enjoying themselves after their own fashion. The light flickered on them, too, and on the brick pavement, and on the trees, plentiful almost as canals in the town. Julia leaned forward and looked, and listened to the guttural Dutch voices, and the curious patois to be heard now and then, and the distant notes of music that blended with it. And the flickering lights and shadows danced across her mind, and the simple holiday feeling of it all ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... preachers, for instance, Fra. Giovanni di Vicenza, yet many of the itinerant friars, the first, we believe, who addressed the people with great activity in the vulgar tongue, must have been much circumscribed by the limits of their own patois.[1] But the spectacle of the dramatic exhibitions everywhere spoke a common language; and the dialogue, which, in parts of the Chester mysteries, is a kind of Anglicized French, and which, even if translated into the native tongue, was constantly interspersed with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... the midst of busy up-to-date Canada, with French roofs, narrow tilting streets, and ever the smell of fish. There is a good harbor, and there are wharfs where blackfaced men with blue stockings, caps, and gold earrings chatter the patois and smoke their pipes. In the busy time of year there are ten thousand men in the town and it is a scene ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... divinity. The educational movement promoted by men like Maurokordatos had a double end; it revived the knowledge of the great age of Greece through its literature, and it taught the Greek to regard the speech which he actually used not as a mere barbarous patois which each district had made for itself, but as a language different indeed from that of the ancient world, yet governed by its own laws, and capable of performing the same functions as any other modern tongue. It was now that the Greek ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... countenance, beaming with good-humour and contentment, and with a general look of affluence over her whole comfortable person. She spoke in a loud voice which made itself heard over the remaining din in the garden and out, and with a patois between Scotch and Irish, which puzzled me, until I found from her discourse that she was the widow of a linen manufacturer, in the neighbourhood ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... said Moina, "it was very foolish of us not to stay among the mountains a few days longer. It was much nicer there. Did you hear that horrid child moaning all night, and that wretched woman, gabbling away in patois no doubt, for I could not understand a single word she said. What kind of people can they have put in the next room to ours? This is one of the horridest nights I have ever spent ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... trencher as if you wished your turn was come," said he, in a patois of English and French, which Leonard could easily understand, although he had always turned a deaf ear to Gaston's attempts to instruct him in the latter language. However, a grunt was ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... it hovered at one instant over a steaming saucepan, and the next was lifting a full milk-jug or opening a wine-bottle. Above the clatter of the dishes and the stirring of spoons arose the thick Normandy voices, deep alto tones, speaking in strange jargon of speech—a world of patois removed from our duller comprehension. It was made somewhat too plain in this country, we reflected, that a man's stomach is of far more importance than the rest of his body. The kitchen yonder was by far the most comfortable, the warmest, and altogether ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... declining 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.
... disparity in their ages. Vinje, a peasant from Thelemark, was thirty-two; he had been a village schoolmaster and had only now, in 1850, contrived to reach the University. With Vinje, the founder of the movement for writing exclusively in Norwegian patois, Ibsen had a warm personal sympathy, while he gave no intellectual adherence to his theories. Between the births of Vinje and Bjoernson there stretched a period of fourteen years, yet Bjoernson was ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... amusing to all concerned. We had better have held our tongues, I suspect. Any departure from discipline is bad. The Frenchmen who were on deck soon began to imitate our example, and, as they mostly spoke in a patois or jargon which we, of course, could not understand, we did not know what they were saying. I thought I saw a peculiar expression on the faces of some of them, especially when now and then they glanced round and looked at our men. At last, I told McAllister that I fancied the Frenchmen were plotting ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... descendants of the Puritans. It is the little Jewish boy, the Greek or the Sicilian, who takes the traveler through historic streets, now the home of these newer people to the Old North Church or to Paul Revere's house, or to Tea Wharf, and tells you in his strange patois the story ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Thunder 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, ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... black mass; but when they blew on the mass, a red glow would blush from it, 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 to my ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... 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 it anxiously. ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... Rev. Percy 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 and said, "Look at ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... another human being. At length I met a woman carrying a distaff, and tried to get into conversation with her, but it was impossible; she could not speak a word of French, and I knew nothing of her Limousin patois. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... well as a district 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 know us and can't teach us anything. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... and 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 ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... myself that he was really what he seemed to be. But by-and-by two or three men—rough, uncouth fellows—dropped in to reinforce the landlord, and they, too seemed to have no other business than to sit in silence looking at me, or now and again to exchange a word in a PATOIS of their own. By the time my supper was ready, the knaves numbered six in all; and, as they were armed to a man with huge Spanish knives, and made it clear that they resented my presence in their dull rustic fashion—every ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman |
