[Ads-l] An extreme deletion in Philadelphia AAVE

[Wilson Gray]

You couldn’t get ahold of me, either, if I’d won only a mere million
dollars! 😜

On Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 11:11 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yesterday in a local convenience store I heard a Black man standing near me
> complaining to his buddies and apparently the world at large. I couldn't
> understand all of what they were saying, but they'd been buying lottery
> tickets and were talking about them. He said something about a winning
> ticket with a huge value (a hundred million dollars??), and then he said he
> couldn't find his [ãʔ]. I said "Excuse me, please, but what are you trying
> to find?" "My [ãʔ]." "What?" "My [ãʔ]." I shook my head, still not
> understanding. He repeated it several times, getting louder each time.
> Finally it struck me and I put it together with something else I'd
> overheard. His aunt had won this prize, and he couldn't get in touch with
> her.
>
>      /ant/ Standard pronunciation (or with /æ/ or /ɑ/)
> →  [anʔ]  The familiar change of final /t/ to a glottal stop
> →  [ãʔn]  Familiar nasalization of a prenasal vowel
> →  [ãʔ]   Deletion of the nasal consonant, common after nasalization of
> preceding vowel
>
> This is probably not news at all to many of the members of this list (I'm
> especially looking at you, Wilson :-) ), but it was to me.
>
> Mark
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-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

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