Words for grandparents: was: Pittsburgh Dialect

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:14 AM -0400 10/19/00, Alice Faber wrote:
>Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>>That "Pup-up" is usually spelled "Pop Pop" here, and my in-laws in
>>Baltimore used it too.  "Nana" is cited by a lot of my students, along with
>>"Gram" (not Granny, which they say sound old-fashioned).  I suspect Gram
>>and Nana are new-fangled forms, implying (at least for some of my students)
>>cool, less "old sounding" terms for their hip young grandmothers.  How far
>>back does Nana go?
>
>I grew up in the 50s in a NY suburb. In my immediate family, we
>distinguished between the two grandmothers as "Grandma Faber" and
>"Grandma Greenberg". One set of cousins, however, referred to Grandma
>Faber as "Nana"; I don't recall what they called their other
>grandmother, though, even though I should (this other grandmother is
>the one who taught me to knit and crochet, with European
>yarn-handling techniques).
>
>Alice
>--
this, or a variant, does seem to be a Jewish (at least Ashkenazic)
tradition.  Growing up in NYC and its suburbs in the late 1940's and
early '50's, my brother and I knew our maternal grandmother only as
"Nanny" (not "Nana", but close), and her daughter--my aunt--is
"Nanny" to HER grandchildren.  In each case, only one of the two
grandmothers is "Nanny", but presumably it's not always the maternal
grandmother.

larry