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More "Patois" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 to have been the farthest from ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... but the stay, if not long, was most decidedly pleasant. I grew to speak Spanish fluently, haunted the town of Mazatlan (from which the Jamestown had long since departed), and made as good use generally of my temporary employment as was possible. I tried hard to master the patois of the peon as well as the flowery and eloquent language of the aristocracy, for I knew well that should I at any time seek employment as overseer at a rancho either in Mexico or Arizona, a knowledge of the former would be indispensable, while a knowledge of the latter was at ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... 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 hindrance ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... 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 ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... (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 ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... points; he wore a red tie; his thick brown clothes might have been bought ready made in the Edgeware Road; evidently he had honoured the occasion with his Sunday best. While his comrades jabbered together, in patois which flung in a French word now and then, like a sop to Cerberus, he spoke not a word; yet I saw his lips tighten, as he laid his arm over the neck of a small but well-built mule of a colour which matched its master's ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... "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, Madame. We only want a room. Chambre-a-coucher. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various
... 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 his ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... 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
... 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
... friction, and might spoil all. So, in a few well-chosen words, I informed Tom that there was a trifle between Alf and me; and he was sick, just when I wanted to keep him on his feet for a while. Would Tom (and my patois became so hideously homely that, for the reader's sake, I have to paraphrase it)—would Tom, as a personal favour to me, call round at Alf's camp, morning and evening, for a few days, and in the meantime keep his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... afraid," called one in a curious patois dialect, about five-sixths of which seemed made up of Spanish words, distorted ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... where an order given in English is understood at the first try, and where the English language is not assassinated and dismembered by menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this restaurant!... Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air. Not only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had brought the particular kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were over thirty dishes ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... was a rough Provencal sailor, who had fought his way from the forecastle to the quarter-deck. Indignant at Dumanoir's conduct, he had early in the battle given orders to steer for the thickest of it. "Lou capo sur lou 'Bucentaure'!" ("Head her for the 'Bucentaure'!") he shouted in his native patois. He arrived too late to fight for victory, but he fought for the honour of his flag. After engaging several British ships, Infernet struck to the "Orion." An officer of the "Conqueror" (which had taken ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... language I did not understand, and my father made no answer. Then he began a kind of Anglo-French, worse than the patois we used at St. Regis when we did not speak Iroquois. I made out the talk between the two, understanding ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... 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. ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... able to reply like a true friend, and send him away. Consider, dear, it is not like a nobody dangling after a public singer; that is common enough. We are all run after by idle men; even Signorina Zubetta, who has not much voice, nor appearance, and speaks a Genoese patois when she is not delivering a libretto. But for a gentleman of position, with a heart of gold and the soul of an emperor, that he should waste his time and his feelings so, on a woman who can never be anything to him, it ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... ought to have more sense than to load up with a lot of cursed patois. Nothing but French and Indian! We'll have to put the precious dears in the sleeping-tent, and bunk down ourselves with blankets in the other. Did you air the blankets good this ...
— The Cursed Patois - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... that he might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio. She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables, she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while descending the Matterhorn after ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... two words somewhat together, and dwelling long on the last syllable, which is sounded like a long French "eu" and a French "i." These words I am told mean, "Drunk again to-day also?" the "anc'uei" being a Piedmontese patois for "ancora oggi." The bird repeated these words three or four times over, and then turned round on its perch, to all appearance terra cotta again. The effect produced upon the drunkard was such that he could never again be prevailed upon to touch wine, and ever ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... when this scheme was carried into practice, it will surprise no one to hear that it was not crowned with success. I disliked extremely this visitation of the poor. I felt shy, I had nothing to say, with difficulty could I understand their soft Devonian patois, and most of all—a signal perhaps of my neurotic condition—I dreaded and loathed the smells of their cottages. One had to run over the whole gamut of odours, some so faint that they embraced the nostril with a fairy kiss, others bluntly gross, of the 'knock- you-down' order; some ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... her songs, sitting on the rug before the fire,—Le Beau Voyageur, Les Neiges de la Cloche, ballads in Canadian patois sung to minor airs brought over from France two hundred ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... French music, French voices, and the conversation in French!" for the botanist addressed the females in that language, though with a strong Rhenish patois, that confirmed my first impressions of his nationality. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... The man 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 been sent out by the Earl of Selkirk to colonise that ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... They have 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
... 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
... 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 my ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the chief said, speaking a patois of Latin which Malchus found it difficult to understand. "We will then discuss the matters concerning which ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... 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 the Negro's answer was, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... him his own demand, or make affidavit 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 ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... 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
... 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, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aged Amoagos. (Aloud) Allow me to send for one of my people. (He signs Inez to ring. To the duchess) Permit me to say a few words to him. (To the footman) Tell my negro—but no, you won't understand his frightful patois. Make signs ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... up a narrow street and the chauffeur was tooting in vain, trying to persuade a half-dozen soldiers carrying bales of bay on their backs, to make room for us to get by. With much evident reluctance the first man drew a bit to the right, the second vociferated something in a picturesque patois, and just as we passed the third, I leaned forward and grabbed ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... 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 ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... dialect which Mrs. Baliol used. It was Scottish—decidedly Scottish—often containing phrases and words little used in the present day. But then her tone and mode of pronunciation were as different from the usual accent of the ordinary Scotch PATOIS, as the accent of St. James's is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it seemed to be the Scottish as spoken ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... 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
... accomplished his task first, 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 ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... 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 were thy first care;—the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... he 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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 ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... of Henry IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... plan still more 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 as keen as the dart which a feather wings. My plans now were formed in a breath, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... disputation in the compound. The troopers were squabbling amongst themselves; he was able to make this much out in spite of the fact that the sepoys, recruited exclusively from the native population of Khandawar, spoke a patois of Hindi so corrupt that even an expert in Oriental languages would experience difficulty in trying to interpret it. Amber did not weary himself with the task, but presently lifted up his voice and demanded silence, desiring to be informed if his sleep was to be continually broken by ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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
... every stratum, can at any 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, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... 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 say ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... him an unintelligible answer in the country patois, and passing between them he entered the cottage. On the table stood a large jug of water, and lifting it he took a long draught. There was a sudden crash, and he fell heavily, struck down from behind with a heavy mallet by one of the women. He was stunned by the blow, and when he ...
— The Lion of the North • G.A. Henty
... Sheridan 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! ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... know a little Italian, and my Gascon patois is something like Spanish: perhaps I may understand Latin without ever having ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... 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 more impatience she made a similar answer: ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... know his name—nodded, with a torrent of sullen patois. He had never come for his two dollars, and now the man was gone and he would never get it. But it was not his fault. The first man—the one who had sent him to the Halfway with the horse—had caught him crawling back for the letter, had told him the man who was ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... 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 French. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to look round at Pen, and uttered a few words hurriedly in her Spanish patois. Then, as if recollecting herself, she caught the bread-cake from where she had placed it, broke a piece off, and put it in the young rifleman's hand, speaking again quickly, every word being incomprehensible, though her movements were plain enough as she signed to ...
— !Tention - A Story of Boy-Life during the Peninsular War • George Manville Fenn
... instance Monpavon had very near him—and you should have seen how the disdainful curve of his nose was accentuated at every glance in his direction—Garrigou the singer, a countryman of Jansoulet, distinguished as a ventriloquist, who sang Figaro in the patois of the South and had not his like for imitating animals. A little farther on, Cabassu, another fellow-countryman, a short, thick-set man, with a bull-neck, a biceps worthy of Michel Angelo, who resembled equally a Marseillais ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... a 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 ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 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 des ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... popular that it must be allowed to soil this page. Besides, if we penetrate within the 13th arrondissement, we are forced to accept its picturesque patois. Tirer une carotte has a dozen allied meanings, but it suffices to give it here as: To dupe. Monsieur de Rochefide, like all little minds, was terribly afraid of being carotte. The noun has become a verb. From the very start of his passion for Madame Schontz, Arthur was on ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... 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 of ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... my staircase groping their way in the dark, and we descend preceded by a servant carrying luminare minus quam ut praeesset nocti.' 'I am certain,' he adds pleasantly, 'that they make songs about me in their Austrian patois. Poor souls! it is well they can ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... 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; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... 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 colony ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... it I will pay for it," said Bouvier du Bouchet, a rich farmer who was present, "and if you do not I will eat what is left and you shall pay for it." [Footnote: This sentence is patois, and the translator inserts the original. "Sez vosu meze, z'u payo, repondit Bouvier du Bouchet, gros fermier qui se trouvait present; e sez vos caca en rotaz, i-zet vo ket paire et ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... dropped into a pot of boiling water which hung over 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
... just where it was most 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 ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... answer, in a patois, half French, half Italian, as Raoul expected, if all were right. "We are bound into la Padulella, and wish to keep in with the land to hold the breeze the longer. We are no great sailer at the best, and have a drift, because we ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... FELICE BOUDREAUX, sisters, were once slaves on the plantation of Dermat Martine, near Opelousas, Louisiana. As their owners were French, they are more inclined to use a Creole patois than English. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... forth. Even in the most barbarous jargons he will find terms which throw light upon the literary Iranian of the lexicons: for instance "Madiyan" a mare presupposes the existence of "Narayan" a stallion, and the latter is preserved by the rude patois of the Baloch mountaineers. This process of general collection would in our day best be effected after the fashion of Professor James A. H. Murray's "New English Dictionary on Historical Principles." It would be compiled by a committee of readers resident in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and poor speak correctly; there is no vulgar style; but children have a 'patois' of their own, using many words in their play which men would scorn to repeat. The Bamapela have adopted a click into their dialect, and a large infusion of the ringing "ny", which seems to have been for the purpose of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... passed than he heard a whoa! and a man's face peered around the buggy wing, not at James, but at his medicine-case. James could just discern the face, bearded and shadowy in the gathering gloom. Then a voice came. It shouted, one word, the expressive patois of the countryside, that word which may be at once a question and a salute, may express almost any emotion. "Halloo!" said ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... uttered his woe in a quivering voice, shifting from a Bengal patois to Mandarin, and again to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... and it was said that in a cottage he noted every piece of crockery on the shelf, every domestic utensil, and even the number of knives and forks that were got ready for use at dinner. His acquaintance 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; ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... 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 by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... languages were spoken, and traffic was conducted in a patois of all the dialects. Cloth, powder, lead, knives, and brandy were exchanged for skins and furs. A gentleman who attended one of these fairs told me that the scene was full of interest and abounded in amusing incidents. Of late years the navigation of the Amoor ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... patois in England?' I was once asked; and when I told them not, 'Ah, then, French?' ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sans reproche et sans pudeur, Dans son patois de Bourgogne, Bredouillait comme un ivrogne, "Bons amis, J'ai ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... 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 ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... 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 ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... village and the cloister is a preparation ready at hand, and places the boor at once on the same footing as the monk: a little more amplitude in the smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpetue was a robust nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois, droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the bigotry or the hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients abruptly, roughly, was crabbed with the dying, almost flung God in their faces, stoned their death ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... they would come to ask me something or to thank me. No one moved. I returned as if by chance towards them; the same silence, the same indifference. An hour later, was at the top of the cliff, and I asked the coast-guard who those people were who spoke neither French, nor Italian, nor patois. He told me their name, which I ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... France, he was travelling faster still to another destination. Daily he grew weaker and more indifferent. An old rustic accent of Lower Normandy reappeared in his speech, from which it had long been banished, and grew stronger; old words of the patois, too: Ouistreham, matrasse, and others, the sense of which we were sometimes unable to guess. On the very last day he began again his eternal story of the cross and the Emperor. The Major, who was particularly ill, or at least particularly cross, uttered some angry words of ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I 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
... poetry, in which the assurance is conveyed that there will be plenty to eat and plenty of gin and beer to drink, and that whatever they may have omitted to say will be told by the bride and bridegroom at the feast. This verse in the native patois ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... the sounds that had swept my memory back to civilization and drawn me from my Golden Bed. O Lalala had all the slang of poker—the poker of the waterfronts of San Francisco and of Shanghai—and evidently he had already taught his eager pupils that patois. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... traveller might recognise 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 ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... 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 to hold ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... noisy groups of 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
... 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, both ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... 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 knowledge ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... 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
... missaying[obs3], malapropism, antiphrasis[obs3]. pun, paranomasia[obs3], play upon words; word play &c. (wit) 842; double-entendre &c. (ambiguity) 520[Fr]; palindrome, paragram[obs3], anagram, clinch; abuse of language, abuse of terms. dialect, brogue, idiom, accent, patois; provincialism, regionalism, localism; broken English, lingua franca; Anglicism, Briticism, Gallicism, Scotticism, Hibernicism; Americanism[obs3]; Gypsy lingo, Romany; pidgin, pidgin English, pigeon English; Volapuk, Chinook, Esperanto, Hindustani, kitchen Kaffir. dog Latin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... rapidly 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.
... Melchior, my brave man," said old Andregg, in his rough patois; "and I shall be glad to see thee give up this wild mountain life and become ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... appeared to be Spaniards, but there was a large sprinkling of Jews in the dress of those of Barbary, and here and there a turbaned Moor. There were gangs of sailors likewise, Genoese, judging from the patois which they were speaking, though I occasionally distinguished the sound of "tou logou sas," by which I knew there were Greeks at hand, and twice or thrice caught a glimpse of the red cap and blue silken petticoats of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and flat prairies of Indiana and Ohio could tempt me. No wonder the Swiss die for their native valleys! I would if I were they. I asked him about education. He said his children went to a school kept by Catholic sisters, who taught reading, writing, and Latin. The dialect of Chamouni is a patois, composed of French and Latin. He said that provision was very scarce in the winter. I asked how they made their living when there were no travellers to be guided up Mont Blanc. He had a trade at which he wrought in winter months, and his ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 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 ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... 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 personality. I was afraid of ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... was thirteen years old Guy lived with his mother at Etretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where between the sea and the luxuriant country, he grew very fond of nature and out door sports; he went fishing with the fishermen of the coast and spoke patois with the peasants. He was deeply devoted to his mother. He first entered the Seminary of Yvetot, but managed to have himself expelled on account of a peccadillo of precocious poetry. From his early religious education he conserved a marked hostility to Religion. Then he ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... dresses, with red cotton shawls, and 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 colony ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the Pyrenees had been drawn behind, us, and we were passing from the patois of Languedoc to the patois of Provence, where the peasants say pardie in place of pardou when an exclamation of surprise ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... wife for the sake of her son!' In his insane fury he jumbled together indiscriminately the abusive patois of his native hillside, 'Ah la garso! Ah li bongri!' with the classical exclamations of Harpagon bewailing his casket, Justice, justice du ciel!' and other select extracts often recited to his pupils. It was as light as day in the bright rays of the tall electric lamps standing round the ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... 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, ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... crowd than that in which, two minutes later, we found ourselves mingling unchallenged. They accepted us, may be, as a minor miracle of the night. They gazed at us curiously there in the light of the conflagration, and from us away to the burning island, and talked together in whispers, in a patois of which I caught but one word in three. They asked us no questions. Their voices filled the beach with a kind of subdued murmuring, all alike ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... 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 rustic is suspicious—I began ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... 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
... came 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
... thee, Melchior, 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
... a tall man, 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 forward, kissed ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... educated daily press calls the "world of art" and the "realm of literature," Querida's picture was discussed intelligently and otherwise, but it was discussed—from the squalid table d'hote, where unmanicured genius punctures the air with patois and punches holes in it with frenzied thumbs, to quiet, cultivated homes, where community of taste restricts the calling lists—from the noisy studio, where pianos and girls make evenings lively, to the austere bare boards or the velvet ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... the goblin responded huskily, in his patois; and he limped on before us, all the chickens hopping and ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... upon me first, and my appearance seemed to amuse him vaguely, at any rate he laughed rudely, saying in barbarous Greek mixed with words from the local patois—"What a curious old animal! I have never seen you before, ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 many parts of the Pyrenaeans ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... hours after her return from the mountain, absolved her conscience from any intent of eavesdropping in overhearing the talk of the table to the right of her. The remark that first fixed her attention was in English, of the super-British patois. ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... it was not exactly London slang, but a patois or dialect, learned partly from her husband, partly from her companions, ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... 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 ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... In the half light he might have been a huge animal, a hulking creature of some sort walking upright. Carrigan's fingers closed more tightly on the butt of his automatic. The woman began to talk swiftly in a patois of French and Cree. David caught the gist of it. She was telling Bateese to carry him to the canoe, and to be very careful, because m'sieu was badly hurt. It was his head, she emphasized. Bateese must be careful ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 in binding up ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... 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 ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... she broke off to ask. "I've always thought of it as patter, or patois, the Gypsy patois, and somehow it strikes me as absurd to follow a language over the world—a sort of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... 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, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... 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 ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Italy; 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
... cool cheek and ecstasy, given forth in the patois of the London suburbs, amused Joan. Here was a funny, whimsical, pathetic, pretty little thing, she thought—queerly wise, too, and with all about her a curious appeal for friendship and kindness. "Stay, of course," she said. "I'm very glad ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... were spoken, and traffic was conducted in a patois of all the dialects. Cloth, powder, lead, knives, and brandy were exchanged for skins and furs. A gentleman who attended one of these fairs told me that the scene was full of interest and abounded in amusing incidents. Of late years the navigation of the Amoor has discontinued the fair of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... open sea, are rarely in evidence, being replaced by herons and pelicans. I had not therefore set eyes on a seagull for many weeks, when early one morning I heard, from the farther side of a wooded headland, a new note suggestive of a wild cat or possibly a lynx. My Greek servant tried in his patois to explain the unseen owner of the mysterious voice, but it was only when a small gull suddenly came paddling round the corner that I realised ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... 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
... A dirty little launch full of uniforms was coming alongside. Until the yellow flag—a polite symbol in that port—should be hauled down Simpson would be left alone. The uniforms had climbed to the deck and were chattering in a bastard patois behind him; now and then the smell of the town struck across the smells of the sea and the bush like the flick of a snake's tail. Simpson covered his eyes for a moment, and immediately the vision of the island as he had seen it at dawn swam in his mind. But he could not keep his eyes forever ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Pidgin-English, the patois spoken in China, meaning business-English, pigeon being the ordinary ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... with the black throats!" (This was the name which they had given to the Calvinists.) "Three cheers for the white cockade! Before we are done, it will be red with the blood of the Protestants!" However, on the 5th of May they ceased to wear it, replacing it by a scarlet tuft, which in their patois they called the red pouf, which was immediately ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... she is such a bundle of 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
... woe in a quivering voice, shifting from a Bengal patois to Mandarin, and again to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... 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 I ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... 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 ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... IV., with an inscription in Latin and in patois, is on the esplanade; the armor is finished so perfectly that it might make an armorer jealous. But why does the king wear so sad an air? His neck is ill at ease on his shoulders; his features are small and full of care; he has lost his ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... 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 protection ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... for 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 wounded at some ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... for the passer-by; and 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... 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 Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... verses are not widely popular, they are at least comparatively fresh and original; and to those readers who can readily grasp the patois, as well as to those who are compelled to struggle painfully through its labyrinths, ...
— The Norsk Nightingale - Being the Lyrics of a "Lumberyack" • William F. Kirk
... called one in a curious patois dialect, about five-sixths of which seemed made up of Spanish words, distorted ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only the manifestations ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... something further, a 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 ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a language, sir," he said. "A dialect, a patois. Partly Turkish, partly Slavonic, ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... said the cardinal, 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
... hoping that he might elect to accompany her to Cavloccio. She would willingly have paid him for loss of time. Her ear was becoming better tuned each moment to his strange patois. Though he often gave a soft Italian inflection to the harsh German syllables, she grasped his meaning quite literally. She had read so much about Switzerland that she knew how Michel Croz was killed while descending the ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... some people coming," Harry said; "as we pass them please talk with a little patois. Your good French would ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... 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 the weekly auction ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 the dialects in ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... Ayonhwatha—"he who made the wampum belt."[2] They had adopted weaker tribes when they conquered them, exactly as, upon the marriage of a daughter, the father built an addition to his house for the newly wedded couple. The captives had picked up the Breton patois rather easily, but there was nothing in France which was at all like an Iroquois bark house, and they had to use the Indian word for it. Maclou, who had been studying the native language at odd times during the voyage, found that it had no ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... opinion by the peculiarity of the dialect which Mrs. Baliol used. It was Scottish—decidedly Scottish—often containing phrases and words little used in the present day. But then her tone and mode of pronunciation were as different from the usual accent of the ordinary Scotch PATOIS, as the accent of St. James's is from that of Billingsgate. The vowels were not pronounced much broader than in the Italian language, and there was none of the disagreeable drawl which is so offensive to southern ears. In short, it ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 gave ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... 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 the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... paying a 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 ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... ordered. It is to be regretted that the Bilgewater Club, cut off from the house rules in a private dining room, had a habit of shooting craps occasionally after luncheon, and Cappy Ricks had picked up the patois of the game. "Seventy-five thousand is the limit; but satisfy yourself she's worth the limit ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... narrow street and the chauffeur was tooting in vain, trying to persuade a half-dozen soldiers carrying bales of bay on their backs, to make room for us to get by. With much evident reluctance the first man drew a bit to the right, the second vociferated something in a picturesque patois, and just as we passed the third, I leaned forward and grabbed the ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... from those who only behold her from the sea. Here there was an exodus of passengers, and of luggage, and an invasion of natives with baskets of fruit. Vixen bought some grapes and peaches of a female native in a cap, whose patois was the funniest perversion of French and English imaginable. And then a bell rang clamorously, and there was a general stampede, and the gangway was pulled up and the vessel was steaming gaily towards Jersey; ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls "the seemly raiment of cultured speech" than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible patois in which they thought and prayed and quarrelled and made love. If Tennyson failed (which I do not admit) in such poems as "The Northern Farmer," it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the dialect, but because he ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 island trees ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... 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 wriggling ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... 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 ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... return,—we have jolly little breakfasts together in the salon. They consist of coffee and rolls, and are served by a droll, snappish little garcon with no teeth, and an Italian-French patois which is very hard to understand when he sputters. He told me the other day that he had been a garcon for forty-six years, which seemed ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... 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 ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... 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, ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... were brave boors, who spoke nothing but Styrian or Carinthian, or some border dialect, which nothing but barbarism had ever heard of, and which nothing but Austrian organs could have ever pronounced. The French recruits were from provinces which had their own "beloved patois," and which, to the Parisian, held nearly the same rank of civilized respect as the Kingdom of Ashantee. Besides, it was to be remembered, that all round me was a scene of suffering—the dismal epilogue of a field of battle; or rather the dropping ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... Latin any more than the abbot understood Greek, and the situation became awkward, for the pitch of Martin's voice made it evident that he was not a person to be trifled with. The old man therefore tried what the Romance patois, which he had picked up from foreign residents in the city, could do to establish intelligible intercourse with the rough visitor. Fortunately the crusader also knew something of that patois, and made the purpose of his visit sufficiently clear. As soon as the iron ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... 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
... 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
... long, was most decidedly pleasant. I grew to speak Spanish fluently, haunted the town of Mazatlan (from which the Jamestown had long since departed), and made as good use generally of my temporary employment as was possible. I tried hard to master the patois of the peon as well as the flowery and eloquent language of the aristocracy, for I knew well that should I at any time seek employment as overseer at a rancho either in Mexico or Arizona, a knowledge of the former would be indispensable, while a knowledge of the latter was at all times useful ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... 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 a music pastoral ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... to her nearest of kin and her dearest,—her honey-lovers—her insects: these are wasp-colors. I do not know whether the fact ever occurred to the childish fancy of this strange race; but there is a creole expression which first suggested it to me;—in the patois, pouend gupe, "to catch a wasp," signifies making love to a pretty colored girl. ... And the more one observes these costumes, the more one feels that only Nature could .have taught such rare comprehension of powers and harmonies ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... dashed into eternity. Wonderful to relate, I did not "Oh!" nor "Ah!" nor shriek once, but remained crouched in the back of the wagon, as silent as death. When we were again in safety, the driver exclaimed, in the classic patois of New England, "Wall, I guess yer the fust woman that ever rode over that are hill without hollering." He evidently did not know that it was the intensity of my fear ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... 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 ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... lowland Scotch, an ancient branch of English, dry and gnarled, but still flourishing in its old age, had become instead, his mother-tongue; and the man who loves the antique speech, or even the mere patois, of his childhood, and knows how to use it, possesses therein a certain kind of power over the hearts of men, which the most refined and perfect of languages cannot give, inasmuch as it has travelled farther from the original ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Kitts, of the Leeward group, anchoring a half-mile away from 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 eyes peeping through her ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a man of whom I asked the way, speaking in a curious kind of guttural patois, half French and half ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... 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 lips and nodded ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... 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 of the ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that strange 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 and unnaturally ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... the budget for that year amounted to L63,000, which works thus out at a cost of L8 6s. 1d. per head for the Boer children. Dr. Mansveldt, Head of the Education Department of the Transvaal, a Hollander, seems to have but one aim: to enforce the use of the taal, the Boer patois—a language spoken by no one else—the use of which keeps them in isolated ignorance. The English language ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... woman with flaxen hair trotted from the house. She was twanging a Swedish patois—not in monotone, like English, but singing it, with ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... 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
... pure French, interspersed with words of an uncouth patois, which I ascribed to long ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... women also, with 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
... fiercely! 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, ma che cosa? Al giorno di grasso, un mezzo pollo ovvero un piccolo ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... a whoa! and a man's face peered around the buggy wing, not at James, but at his medicine-case. James could just discern the face, bearded and shadowy in the gathering gloom. Then a voice came. It shouted, one word, the expressive patois of the countryside, that word which may be at once a question and a salute, may express almost any ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... recipe has brought upon itself such 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, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... 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
... her 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, it was the ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... not long in discovering that his work must begin with the most elementary instruction. Generally, the people were ignorant of any language but their native patois. Up to this period their schoolmasters, paid at the rate of twenty-five francs a year, had been peasants like themselves. Their only time for study was such of the year as was not needed for the tilling of the niggardly soil or spent in the care of the flocks. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... other men, add no feathers unto mine. I have seen a grammarian tower and plume himself over a single line in Horace, and show more pride, in the construction of one ode, than the author in the composure of the whole book. For my own part, besides the jargon and patois of several provinces, I understand no less than six languages; yet I protest I have no higher conceit of myself than had our fathers before the confusion of Babel, when there was but one language in the world, and none to boast himself either linguist or critick. I have not only ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... I am to take you on alone," said Croisset, after he had replied to the words spoken in a patois which Howland could not understand. "They will ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... 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
... 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
... into a loud screeching laugh, and, with her old Walpurgis gaiety, danced some fantastic steps in her bare wet feet, tracking the floor with water, and holding out with finger and thumb, in dainty caricature, her slammakin old skirt, while she sang some of her nasal patois with an ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... interchanged by these creatures was of composite sound—now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They appeared to be of all nations, and yet ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... there a knot of soldiers stood talking and laughing. The greater part of the civilians appeared to be Spaniards, but there was a large sprinkling of Jews in the dress of those of Barbary, and here and there a turbaned Moor. There were gangs of sailors likewise, Genoese, judging from the patois which they were speaking, though I occasionally distinguished the sound of "tou logou sas," by which I knew there were Greeks at hand, and twice or thrice caught a glimpse of the red cap and blue silken petticoats of the mariner from the Romaic isles. On still I hurried, till I arrived at a ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Jeannette sang her songs, sitting on the rug before the fire,—Le Beau Voyageur, Les Neiges de la Cloche, ballads in Canadian patois sung to minor airs brought over from France ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... hardly 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 thrice in a week; and, as for penance, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... years of age, and for the last two years had been absent from Vernet—for reasons which will shortly be made to appear. He had been sent to Paris to see something of the world, and learn to talk French instead of the patois of his valley; and having left Paris had come down south into Languedoc, and remained there picking up some agricultural lore which it was thought might prove useful in the valley farms of Vernet. He was now expected home again very ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... prairies of Indiana and Ohio could tempt me. No wonder the Swiss die for their native valleys! I would if I were they. I asked him about education. He said his children went to a school kept by Catholic sisters, who taught reading, writing, and Latin. The dialect of Chamouni is a patois, composed of French and Latin. He said that provision was very scarce in the winter. I asked how they made their living when there were no travellers to be guided up Mont Blanc. He had a trade at which he wrought in winter months, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... being helped into our trench, however, one of them was hit by an enemy sniper and mortally wounded. Then it was discovered that they were not Germans at all. The man who had been hit said a few incoherent things about his wife and children in the Walloon patois as he lay in the trench, and trying to point to his companion, uttered the one word "Anglais"—that, everyone swears to—and died. No papers were found on either of them, and when the other man was questioned, he merely shook his ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this little conversation between Joe and Cecile broke so dismally, and was so bitterly cold, that the old woman with whom the children had spent the night begged of them in her patois not to leave her. Joe, of course, alone could understand a word she said, and even Joe could not make much out of what very little resembled the Bearnais of his native Pyrenees; but the Norman peasant, being both kind and intelligent, managed to convey to him that the weather ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... I will pay for it," said Bouvier du Bouchet, a rich farmer who was present, "and if you do not I will eat what is left and you shall pay for it." [Footnote: This sentence is patois, and the translator inserts the original. "Sez vosu meze, z'u payo, repondit Bouvier du Bouchet, gros fermier qui se trouvait present; e sez vos caca en rotaz, i-zet vo ket paire et may ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... de la 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 ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... know how to read or write." The cure, in effect, is excluded from such offices by law, and, save in La Vendee and the noble is excluded by public opinion. Besides, in many of the provinces, nothing but patois is spoken.[2322] French, especially the philosophic and abstract phraseology of the new laws and proclamations, remains gibberish to their inhabitants. They cannot possibly understand and apply the complicated decrees and fine-spun instructions which reach ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... mildly remarked that workhouses were now very comfortable. Immediately the younger woman stood erect, and with something akin to pride and determination, exclaimed in a voice more than tinctured by the Irish patois, 'Never, sir, will us go to the workhouse while us can get as much as an crust in twenty-four hours.' Hitherto I had seen her only in a stooping attitude, and I was surprised to see how tall a woman she was, and what strength of character was indicated by ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... 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 ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
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