done/through (was: Those pesky negatives (revisited))

[Wilson Gray]

On Aug 12, 2004, at 1:12 PM, Mark A. Mandel wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      done/through (was: Those pesky negatives (revisited))
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>>>
>
> I have to admit that this is not the first time that I've found myself
> on the wrong side of the grammatical fence. I once believed that only
> the illiterate or the semi-literate used "done" instead of "through" in
> cases such as, "I'll be done with this posting in a few minutes" "you
> can't go out till you're done with your chores" "are you done with
> that?"  "may I use that when you're done?" Then I realized that I was
> wrong. The truth was that only illiterate or semi-literate *white*
> people used such forms. Finally, I realized that I was still wrong, For
> speakers of standard English, such use of "done" is perfectly
> grammatical, used by speakers of all levels of education or social
> standing or sophistication. Rather, it's the use of "through" in cases
> such as those above that is a grammatical peculiarity, a feature of
> everyone's favorite non-standard dialect, Black English.
>
>         <<<
>
> How's that again? I use "through" and "done" interchangeably, as far
> as I
> can tell, in all the above expressions. I'm White, male, in my
> mid-fifties,
> and grew up in New York City and environs in a mostly college-educated
> White
> milieu of friends and family.

I've got you by a about a quarter-century in age. I was born in East
Texas and grew up in Saint Louis. I've also lived in Los angeles and in
Sacramento. A Jewish friend from Brooklyn once pointed out to me that,
just as in BE, the negative imperative of transitive verbs takes the
form, "Don't be doing that!" and not "Don't do that!" but not
intransitives, "Don't go!" but not "Don't be going!" I specify that he
was Jewish because he specifically limited his claim to the speech of
Jews from Brooklyn. With my own ears, I heard a friend of this friend,
with an accent so thick that he sounded like Arnold Stang or like Woody
Allen on a bad day, use, in natural, unmonitored speech, the phrase
"mama-nem" in exactly the context in which I would have said
"mama-nim." These are both constructions that I once would have
considered to be peculiar to BE et sim. "Live and learn," to coin a
phrase.

  Replying to dInIs, he added:
>
>>>>
>                Rather, what I'm claiming is
> merely that a white person would say something like, "I'm done killing
> him," whereas a black person would say something like, "I'm through
> killing him" and that either would say something like "I done finished
> killing him" or "I've finished killing him."
>         <<<
>
> Pulling the examples back to ones that are more realistic for me, I
> would
> usually say "When you're done reading that book, can I have it?", but I
> think I would also sometimes say it with "through". "Done finished" is
> not
> in my dialect. I can't even imagine "done through".

It would be interesting if a white, native New Yorker, in natural,
unmonitored speech, said "done finished." However, that a white person
native either to Missouri or to East Texas would speak this way is not
noteworthy. That any English speaker, native or not, from anywhere on
earth would say "done through" with the meaning "done finished" or
"have finished" or any other meaning should probably be interpreted as
a sign of the End of Days. On the other hand, I would never say, "when
you're done" in natural, unmonitored speech under any circumstances
that I can imagine. FWIW, using the example supplied as a model, I
would most likely say, "When you get through reading that book, let me
see it."

>
> Note that these are different syntactically from your first set of
> examples,
> none of which involved "{done/through} V-ing". This difference
> accounts for
> my more guarded testimony on these participial examples.

True that.

-Wilson Gray

>
> -- Mark A. Mandel
> [This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]
>