"Patois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pray-books, and I 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 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
... "To tell the truth, I'm tired, and I think I'll get to bed early. Anyway, I think I'd better wait a while until I get back my French again. They talk pretty good French. It's a sort of dialect, but I can understand them pretty well. I am told that it is easier to understand their patois or dialect than many of ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... dealing with the trade, revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of his vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he reveals the curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist. Climate had always been one of his hobbies, and on learning that none of the local practitioners was in a position to exact a larger fee than sixpence from his patients (quantum mutatus the Nice physician of 1907!) he ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 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 all abolished. They can never ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... I 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 found it would be an hour and a half to train time, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Harry had seated himself by the side of Lucy, and was telling her in the delicious, stumbling patois of love all that was in his heart. She was bewilderingly beautiful; all his thoughts of her had been far below this intimate observation. Not that he analyzed or tabulated her charms—that would have been like pulling a rose to pieces. He only knew that her ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... mistress to whom the sonnets are supposed to be addressed; and every one knows that rusticale and contadinesca is that naive and pleasing rustic style in which the Florentine poets delighted, from the expressive nature of the patois of the Tuscan peasantry; and it might have been said of Malatesti's sonnets, as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... whom I knew very 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 ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... 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 ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... in authentic fashion. 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 manful labour such as I have nowhere else in such wild ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... assented. "I rejoice that, being of French extraction, and unconversant with your somewhat cryptic patois, the lady in question is the less likely to have been sickened by your extravagances in the way of misapprehension. I candidly confess such imbecility annoys me. What!" he cried out, "what if I marry! is matrimony to be ranked ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... spoke in patois French, the woman in her native Cree language. For convenience we translate their conversation as near as may be into the English in which they were wont to converse with the Scotch settlers who, some time before, had ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the purpose of there chanting the epistle at the midnight mass at Christmas, according to the tenor of an ancient bond, which obliged the chapter to send one of their number yearly to Rome for that purpose. This story I met with in a little volume, entitled Contes populaires, Prejuges, Patois, Proverbes de l'Arrondissement de Bayeux, recueillis et publies, par F. Pluquet, the frontispiece of which consists of a sufficiently graphic representation of the worthy canon's feat. Pluquet concludes his narrative ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... various jocular remarks in patois to Peter, who would have laughed at them had he dared, but, knowing Nance's feelings towards her brother was not sure how she would take it—loudly and ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... 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 ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... I understand 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
... 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 ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the first 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
... 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, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... 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 ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... 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; he watched and listened. In his own ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 years of ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... pertinacious 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 the inhabitants ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... speaking; language, talk, conversation, parlance, words; tongue, dialect; patois; discourse, oration, address, plea, declamation, dissertation, epilogue, allocution, exhortation, disquisition, effusion, descant; harangue, diatribe, tirade, screed, rhapsody, philippic, invective, rant; soliloquy, monologue; dialogue; colloquy; trialogue; interlocution; improvisation; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... visit to England, Burton and the 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 ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... borderland 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 ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... to Tom, although the excitement and peril made travelling a delight. Moreover, the people were kind and friendly, although they spoke such a barbarous patois that it was difficult ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 its speech, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... generous friendship sprang up, despite the 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 a student before either Ibsen or Vinje. That Ibsen immediately formed Bjoernson's acquaintance seems ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... and a half 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 ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... 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. ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... 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 ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the eloquence of the mountains which comes in a strange 'patois' of two tongues; for the mountains speak at once the languages of repose and of convulsion, two languages which have naught ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... said the soldier, dropping into patois. "There is much noise, but we Turcos are here in Morsbronn, and we ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... insular that instead of learning the language and adopting the customs of the country he is in, he makes the indigenous population adopt his! He does not, for example, know much French, but he has evolved a sort of patois—much nearer English than French—that enables the inhabitants to understand him and comprehend what ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Everything here was very interesting to Patsey; the costumes of the women and children, the instruments of husbandry, the air of freedom and independence of the people, and the absence of all ceremony, interested and pleased her. She did not understand a single word of the patois spoken to her by the peasants, and which even Jean had some difficulty in following, although he had spent a good deal of his time at the little chateau during ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... in the patois of the island, a kind of old Norman French which the young man understood very well. He, therefore, ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... have made fair minstrel patter if Peter Siner had shared the white conviction that every emotion expressed in a negro's patois is humorous. Unfortunately, Peter was too close to the negroes to hold such a tenet. He knew this quarrel was none the less rancorous for having been couched in the queer circumlocution of black folk. And behind it all shone ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... 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 adopted as the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 sluts ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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. At least ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... passed away, as he heard 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 hunter and scout of the English camp, and who, he now learned for the ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... pleasure as his sole rule of life. He lived side by side with peasants and poachers, and had himself become a regular country yeoman, wearing a blouse, dining at the wine-shop, and taking more pleasure in speaking the mountain patois than his own native French. The untimely death of his father, killed by an awkward huntsman while following the hounds, had emancipated him at the age of twenty years. From this period he lived his life freely, as he understood it; always in the open air, without ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of his body and the length of his 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 ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... French poems after 1694. At the end of the sixteenth century, Provencal poetry underwent a revival; in our own time, poets such as Jasmin, Aubanel, Roumanille and above all, Mistral, have raised their language from a patois to a literary power. The work of the felibres has been to synthetise the best elements of the various local dialects and to create a literary language by a process not wholly dissimilar to that described at the outset of this book. ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... made an excursion to those singular golden-tinted mountains, the Dolomites, among which live a race of men who speak neither German nor Italian, nor other language known among the hundred dialects of Europe, but a patois left to them from the ancient Latins; they wandered through the valleys of the Inn and its tributaries and wondered at the odd way of living which still prevails ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Molini! never did 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
... 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 lips ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... and he was proclaimed king of the 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 young ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... vulgarisms of Shropshire, the uncouth phraseology of the three ridings of Yorkshire, amaze and bewilder foreigners, who perhaps imagine that they do not understand English, when they are in company with those who cannot speak it. The patois of Languedoc and Champagne, such as "Mein fis sest ai bai via," Mon fils c'est un beau veau, exercises, it is true, the ingenuity of travellers, and renders many scenes of Moliere and Marivaux difficult, if not unintelligible, to those who have ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... no saloons or stores of any kind, but their place is well filled with a neat Catholic church and a substantial school-house. Every man, woman, and child is a devout Roman Catholic, and in their daily intercourse with each other the stranger among them hears a patois something like the French language. The whole of the land cultivated by these people would not make more than an average farm in the north, while compared with the vast sugar estates on every side of ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... 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
... 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 gave ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... 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 ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... 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 ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... from Bayou Teche, the stream 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 life ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 2, June, 1898 • Various
... seeing 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
... 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 ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... nature round me. The 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... beautiful 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 ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... 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
... or tried to analyse, at the 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 of ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... not exactly London slang, but a patois or dialect, learned partly from her husband, partly from her companions, and partly brought ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... 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 ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... 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 all he may see for many ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the stone fireplace built under the vent in the wall. They were dividing with him their last fish! He made an effort and sat up. The younger man came to him and put a bearskin at his back. He had picked up some of the patois of half-blood ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... talking in her own patois; and she scraped a spoonful of soot from the chimney, and putting it into a cup, was about pouring hot water on it for an emetic, when he could stand it no longer, but rushing out of the door, put to flight ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... 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 ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... tourists about to set forth 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 height of ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... them once more under the disguise of Karl and Heinrich, laying the table d'hote in the long and narrow old-fashioned dining-room of the Englischer Hof at Pontresina. Though their native tongue was the patois of the Canton Ticino, they spoke all the civilised languages of the world, 'and also German,' with perfect fluency, and without the slightest attempt at either grammar or idiomatic accuracy. And they both profoundly believed in their hearts that the rank, wealth, youth, beauty and ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 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 course, impossible ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... 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 perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... upon oath in the temple how much they valued the profit they had received under his tuition, and satisfy him accordingly—my pedagogues would find themselves sorely gravelled, if they were to be judged by the affidavits of my experience. My Perigordin patois very pleasantly calls these pretenders to learning, 'lettre-ferits', as a man should say, letter-marked—men on whom letters have been stamped by the blow of a mallet. And, in truth, for the most part, they appear to be deprived even of common sense; for you see ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 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 Sam and ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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 ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them to start immediately 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 ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... Vache! Confound it! He's illegible enough in French, but if he takes it into his head to go off in Italian, and that Corsican patois to boot! I thought I only ran the risk of going crazy, but then I should become stupid, too. Well, you've got it," and he read the whole sentence consecutively: "'The Nile, from Assouan to a distance of twelve miles north of Cairo, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... an altogether 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 ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 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
... "The Patois Poems of the Channel Islands;" "The Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Sower, in the Franco-Norman Dialects of Guernsey ...
— Witchcraft and Devil Lore in the Channel Islands • John Linwood Pitts
... declining regional dialects and languages (Provencal, Breton, Alsatian, Corsican, Catalan, Basque, Flemish) overseas departments: French, Creole patois ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... The young wife recognized the great genius of her husband, and speedily persuaded him to retire from such a narrow sphere. Lablache devoted a year to the serious study of singing, and to emancipating himself from the Neapolitan patois which up to this time had clung to him, after which he became primo basso at the Palermitan opera. He was now twenty, and his voice had become developed into that suave and richly toned organ, such as was never bestowed on another man, ranging two octaves from E flat below to E flat above the bass ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... 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 ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... an affection, 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
... 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 a quiet ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... young rider dismount and approach cautiously—for Andy had entered into the spirit of the thing. He paused to glance apprehensively back and survey the western horizon. Andy greeted the Indian, who grunted his acknowledgment in the patois of the plains. ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... 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 a ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... 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 friends. I arrived at Peubla at twelve o'clock ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... pure French, interspersed with words of an uncouth patois, which I ascribed to long residence in ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... could only speak the patois of the mountains, but some were refugees from the resorts in the valleys below, and among these were two English tourists who had been caught among the mountains by the sudden rising of the flood. They exhibited comparative sang froid, and served ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... leaning or standing 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 up from ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... disposed apparently to weaken the trial by questions without importance: he asked her what language her celestial visitors spoke? "Better than yours," answered the peasant girl. He could not have been, as we say in Scotland, altogether "an ill man," for he acknowledged that he spoke the patois of his district, and therefore that the blow was fair. But perhaps for the moment he was irritated too. He asked her, a question equally unnecessary, "do you believe in God?" to which with more and ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... the Champlain and St. Lawrence line, opened two days ago, and at Isle aux Noix passed into British-American territory, and heard the old French patois of the 'habitans' of that locality, from the mouths of a crowd of curious people awaiting the arrival of the train. At La Prairie we joined the ferry boat, an immense vessel as usual, and dropped ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... 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 Gluyas nigh to ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... 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 his sleep was ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the 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 clothing. The animal rubbed a ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... a polished 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 ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... a lovely, magnificent, fully developed woman, splendidly attired, walking in the Regent's Park, He did not recognise her, but was looking at her with longing eyes, when suddenly she seized him by the arm, and exclaimed in the patois of Piedmont, "Ces tu si! Buzaron." (Is that thou thyself, Buzaron). This latter word is a familiar expression of carnal affection, but, literally, is ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... statute, not by treaty, an 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 characteristics of ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... contradictions, of sweet impulses and rebelliousness, that I'm heartily glad of all the help I can get in bringing her up. There's my car. Do try to come home to luncheon. I'll be missing my lively children and their German-English patois!" ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... few quick sentences in the French patois of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in the stern laughed. Their gayety stirred no response from the midship passenger. If anything, he frowned. He was a serious-minded young man, and he did not understand ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... established himself in the vicinity of the Castle, for he took an interest in me, and taught me to read and write. He was a singular man; but I shall have more to say of him by and by. Until he came, I spoke the rude patois of Kit and Matt; but Mr. Mellowtone taught me a new language, and insisted that ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... mob of things going down to-day,' said one to another, which meant that there would be a heavy cargo in number; we must remember that the Australians have a patois of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... was carried on: for the lad had picked up a somewhat extensive vocabulary of Portuguese among the sailors of the Pandora— many of whom were of that nation. It was a sort of "lingoa geral" spoken along the seaboard of Africa,—not unlike a similar Portuguese patois, current on the coasts and large rivers ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... 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 that ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... 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
... 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 without saying a word. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... together on the margin of Black Brook, each with a fish-pole. Her dark face was bright with interest and excitement as she took her first lesson in the art of angling. She jabbered and chattered in her odd patois, he answered in broadest New England dialect, but the two quite understood each other, and though Jimmy said afterward that it was "dreffle to hear her call the fish pois'n," they were soon great friends and comrades. For weeks he kept and cared ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... to camps of Martiniques, a sort of wild, untamed creature, who spoke a distressing imitation of French which even he did not for a moment claim to be such, but frankly dubbed patois. Restless-eyed black men who answered to their names only at the question "Cummun t'appelle?" and give their age only to those who open wide their mouths and cry, "Caje-vous?" Then on again to the no less strange, sing-song "English" of Jamaica, the whining tones of those whose ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... see a little Italian whose patois English was scarcely intelligible, step forward, with conscious pride, to be the standard-bearer and hold the flag while the class, with eager enthusiasm, saluted, touching foreheads and extending arms at full length as they repeated, the ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... wretched man, shivering and crying with terror, and quite unable to understand why he was going to die, held out his trembling hands—his deformed, hard, labourer's hands—exclaiming in his patois that he had done nothing and ought to be pardoned, the one-eyed man grew quite exasperated at being unable to put the pistol to his temple, owing to ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... Sanskrit; et de meme pour d'autres idiomes. Max Mueller differe des philologues anciens en ceci que tandis qu'ils etudiaient seulement les langues classiques, lui trouve la lumiere et le materiel partout, meme dans le Patois: ainsi le Provencal lui a ete indispensable et bien d'autres langues encore que les amateurs ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... heed; he began waving his cap in long sweeps, cursing meanwhile in a patois which the others could ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 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
... costumes 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 ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... them not dare (and in truth it never occurred to them to dare) interfere with the diversions of the great. Yet as the veiled sacrifice went to mount the litter, one brown-eyed rascal from an upper window, holding a towel over her neck, shrilled out in homely patois, "A vederti, 'Polita mia!" and Ippolita turned her lovely head and showed for a moment her shining wet eyes to those who watched. She smiled tenderly at the send-off, but "Addio, Annina, addio!" she said softly, and turned bowing to ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... 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
... 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
... that the unities were properly respected, and the whole piece, with one exception, moved in harmony with classical rules. That exception was the comic countryman, a lean marionnette in wooden shoes, who spoke in prose and in a broad patois much appreciated by the audience. He took unconstitutional liberties with the person of his sovereign; kicked his fellow-marionnettes in the mouth with his wooden shoes, and whenever none of the versifying suitors were about, made love ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. They ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... their hay or minding their flocks and herds, with that look of cheerful independence imparted by the responsibilities of property. Many greeted us in the friendliest manner, but as we could not understand their patois, a chat was impossible. They laughed, nodded, and ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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 ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... conceive (said the Captain, swearing a great oath) how devout and how learned I was in those days; I talked Latin faster than my own beautiful patois of Alsacian French; I could utterly overthrow in argument every Protestant (heretics we called them) parson in the neighborhood, and there was a confounded sprinkling of these unbelievers in our part of the country. I prayed half a dozen times a day; I fasted ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... a face at him, but old Mrs. Chevalier had been touched on a sore point, and she let out such a stream of fiery PATOIS that Emil fled from the ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... 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
... the old Gascon gentleman, in that pure Bearn PATOIS of which Henry IV could never rid himself, "this horse was born in the house of your father about thirteen years ago, and has remained in it ever since, which ought to make you love it. Never sell it; allow it to die tranquilly and honorably ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a polite, 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 ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... us try. I know a little Italian, and my Gascon patois is something like Spanish: perhaps I may understand Latin ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... said it was a patois, I knew just what he meant. It was equivalent to saying that he couldn't ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... is 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 ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... round on his box—a disquieting habit already noticed, for surely his horse ought to be carefully watched—and again addressed them with what he was convinced was lucidity—no patois, and the clearest ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... 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
... hard features and bronzed complexions, in large straw hats, high white caps, and noisy sabots. On all sides a jargon of Irish, English, and French is to be heard, the latter generally the broadest patois. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Old country airs with plaintive rhythm recurring, Where lurk 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 laburnum; Make us ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... La Fosse stood babbling around me, but I paid no heed either to Castelroux's patois or to La Fosse's misquotations of classic authors. The combat had been protracted, and the methods I had pursued had been of a very exhausting nature. I leaned now against the porte-cochere, and mopped myself vigorously. Then Saint-Eustache, who was engaged ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... veulent-ils voir le Saut de lou Contrabandiste?" said he, in the barbarous dialect of the district, half French, half patois, with a ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... 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 his ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... speak patois in England?' I was once asked; and when I told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the big husband broke down and cried, with his head against the iron of the bed close to his wife. He put his great hand on hers, and talked to her brokenly in their own patois. They had been eight years married, and she had never had a day's serious illness till now. Marcella's eyes filled with tears as she moved about the ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a number of his plays peasants of the cunning, calculating, Norman type, who speak a Norman patois, which may be a souvenir of his own ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... that now she 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 law, and all the ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... 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 a ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... 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 know her—them better, ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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 was now ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... mistaken," interposed the Indian, speaking a patois of the lingoa-geral. "The Mundurucu does not believe in monsters. He believes in big serpents and monkeys,—he ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... with Sir Toby Belch in person. There was nothing so high or so low, in heaven or earth or in the human body, but a woman of this neighbourhood would whip out the name of it, fair and square, by way of conversational adornment. My landlady, who was pretty and young, dressed like a lady and avoided patois like a weakness, commonly addressed her child in the language of a drunken bully. And of all the swearers that I ever heard, commend me to an old lady in Gondet, a village of the Loire. I was making a sketch, and her curse was not yet ended when I had finished it and took ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. Nobody is there to receive ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... receding from the towns; it is frightened away by railways, it is ashamed to show itself in parliament. But it is loved all the more by the people; it appeals to their hearts, and it comes back naturally to all who have ever talked it together in their youth. It is the same with the local patois of High-German. Even where at school the correct High-German is taught and spoken, as in Bavaria and Austria, each town still keeps its own patois, and the people fall back on it as soon as they are among themselves. When Maria Theresa went to the Burgtheater to announce to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 |
