Minstrel's Dialect

[Mark A Mandel]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

#Interesting that this Southern town (in Kentucky?) would use a long 'e' in
#"de," so close to presumably NS schwa-using people when Foster wrote the
#song and Duane saw the show--but the cultural divide would have been great
#by the '50s, of course.

I would guess it was a spelling pronunciation based on the written
lyric, used by people not accustomed to hearing, or at least to writing,
the stop pronunciation of "the", much like our questioner.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania