required plural marking in 2PP

[Wilson Gray]

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 2:56 AM, Michael Newman
<michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu> wrote:
> Once when I was teaching in high school in NYC, I left a class befuddled =
> during a rant about their not turning in their homework. I had said =
> something along the lines of, "you have to do your homework in this =
> class." They just looked confused and one asked me who I meant. I =
> figured that the problem was that I had said the bare "you," which they =
> interpreted as strictly singular. To be understood I should have said =
> "you guys." Now the class was virtually all Latino and Black, (mix of =
> 2nd generation Jamaican American and African American). Spanish has a =
> clean division of labor between singular and plural forms, but is anyone =
> aware of this phenomenon in AAE or Jamaican? They mostly used a reduced =
> form of you all (with /l/ typically vocalized), but the relevant point =
> for me is not the form but the requirement for plural marking.=20

They may well have been confused as to which one of them you were
singling out. My *personal* observation is that the usage is

Sing.:
 _you is_

Pl.:
_y'all are_

in ordinary, unmonitored BE.

My sainted mother mocked me - or should that be "marked"? - all of her
life, because I once said, "You is," to her. Since she didn't let me
forget it, I can say that the year was 1939.

So, that usage has been a long time coming.

WRT to _mark_, I once attempted to "correct" a friend. He was
completely unaware of the pronunciation, _mock_, or even the existence
of any such word as _mock_. Probably, only the fact that we had been
buddies for dekkids, combined with my long-since acquired rep for
being "heavy on top" and an "intellectual," motivated him to make any
attempt to understand what I telling him at all.

Needless to say, _mark_ is the pronunciation that I myself learned,
about the same time that I was saying "you is." Except that _mark_ -
which I literally learned at my grandmother's knee - wasn't marked by
anyone. I had to work it out for myself_, e.g. Is a "marking-bird"
distinct from a "mocking-bird" or not? Is the song "Listen to the
Marking-Bird" or "Listen to the Mocking-Bird"? Why isn't the relevant
meaning of _mark_ in the dictionary? Why do you see only _mock_ in
books?

Etc.
--
-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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