Heard on The Judges: BIN

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Aug 6 17:34:39 UTC 2009


Mid-forty-ish black male speaker:

"No, your honor. She had _BIN_ told me that!"


I don't think that this illustrates anything new or of more than
trivial interest. It's just a FWIW. E.g., "in *my* dialect," to coin a
phrase, It's

"... had BIN _done_ [d at n] told ..."


What *I* found interesting / funny-haha was the contrast between the
coffee-colored ex-girlfriend's fully-rhotic West-Indian - or should
that be "Caribbean-English"? - accent and the light, bright, and
damned near white bruthuh's ordinary, ahra-liss,
could-be-from-almost-anywhere American BE. Indeed, it was only his
absolutely-ordinary colored speech that allowed me to be certain that
he was black.
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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