random BE slang in the HDAS

[Wilson Gray]

On Jul 26, 2004, at 1:27 PM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Beverly Flanigan <flanigan at OHIO.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: random BE slang in the HDAS
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> At 11:18 AM 7/26/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>> At 1:17 AM -0400 7/26/04, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>> It wasn't till I was in my 40's that I
>>> understood that whatchanamit was writing exclusively for a white
>>> Southern audience that would have immediately understood that, e.g.
>>> "brer" (or however he transcribed it) is not meant to be pronounced
>>> "brair." And I'm still left with the problem of what is represented
>>> by
>>> the string, "sezee."
>>
>> "Says he"?  Just a guess.
>>
>> larry
>
> And I suspect Harris was trying to approximate the Gullah quotative
> "say,"
> as in "Bruh Fox answer, say ...." (common in West African creoles
> too).  When I play the OSU Language Files tape of a Gullah woman
> telling
> the Fox and Rabbit tales, I always have to tell my students that the
> woman's "Bruh" [br@] is the same word they've read in Harris (or more
> likely heard in the movie version) as "Brer," and they're amazed, all
> being
> r-ful.  "Bruh" transmutes into "Bro" today, but better Gullah would
> be"Bruh" or "Brudda."

Bruh" is still "bruh." "Bro" is, IMO, as artificial and as misguided as
"African-American" and as fucked up as misspelling "hunky" as "honky"
and adding the otiose "vernacular" - exists there some standard,
literary version of BE that escaped my notice while I was devoting my
primary- and secondary-school years to learning "standard" English as a
second dialect? - to Black English. WTF!

-Wilson Gray

>
> BTW, the audiotapes accompanying LF are priceless, and I've had them
> for
> years.  But when I was at OSU a couple of years ago and asked for a
> replacement for one I had lost (on the Ten Top Languages of the
> World--anyone have it?), Brian Joseph said they could no longer find
> them!  What a loss.
>