Shakespeare in ASL

[Mike Salovesh]

"Bethany K. Dumas" wrote:
>
> On Tue, 6 Jul 1999, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>
> >PS: One nice thing (among many others) about being from the South Midland
> >(i.e., Hillbilly) area is that nobody wants to translate Shakespeare into
> >our variety, since the popular press has told us that us shit-kickers
> >already speak Elizabethan English.
>
> Come on, Dennis -- that"s "pure Elizabethian English."
>
> When I first came to UTK, I routinely fielded calls from journalists
> wanting to know if that wss true. One of the early ones was from the WSJ.

My wife used to field similar calls at the U of Chicago English
Department.  She was always  tempted to answer "yes, their English is
just as pure as yours or mine."  I don't think she ever yielded to that
temptation over the phone -- but she sure as hell did when she told
Raven McDavid about those calls.  He loved it enough that he later took
to saying it himself, always with an extra grin for Peggy if she was in
the room.

--  mike salovesh             <salovesh at niu.edu>        PEACE !!!

P.S.:  Peggy did have a bias on this particular question.  She passed
several of her grade school years in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during WW II,
until her family moved to Memphis.  When she got to high school, her
family had returned to their ancestral haunts in Maywood, Illinois and
her Tennessee speech habits faded into the background. They can unfade
real fast when necessary, however.