antedating of y'all (1702)

[Jonathan Lighter]

We sometimes said "you all" even in NYC when we meant "all of you"; but not
habitually and absolutely *not* when we meant "the two of you."

That's the diff between "you all" and "you all."

Of course, white native New Yorkers never said "y'all" under any any
circumstances, at least not in my hearing.

As I've noted, what we need is not an isolated "you all" or even a "y'all"
in the 18th C. or earlier. We need one used clearly (and, better yet,
routinely) in informal address to two people.

Whether Ben's exx. meet that necessary criterion is not clear to me.

With countless thousands of Southern Civil War letters now available,
surely such "you all"s  should be vast easily findable in large numbers
from the period 1861-65.

Are there? If not, why not?

JL


On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: antedating of y'all (1702)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >
> > Now if a bunch of conversational "you all"s  were to be found (addressed
> to
> > only two rather than a bunch of people) that would be extremely
> significant.
> >
> > (I've searched for 18th century "you all"s, but ECCO isn't quite up to
> it,
> > giving thousands of false hits.  "Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685 -
> > 1835," however, comes up with no positives at all. That's hard to brush
> > aside.)
>
> DARE has Southern-style "you all" from 1816, and Michael Ellis and
> Michael Montgomery present an 1811 example in their 2011 American
> Speech paper, "About _All_: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American
> English I" (AmSp 86(3): 340-354).
>
> The 1811 example can also be seen here:
>
> http://library.sc.edu/socar/mnscrpts/hutchison.html
> "But I am not satisfied nor wont be untill I get Back to you all & my
> native Country."
> Aug. 6, 1811 (Hutchison Family Papers, Univ. of South Carolina)
>
> --bgz
>
> --
> Ben Zimmer
> http://benzimmer.com/
>
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