Singular "yez"?

[Beverly Flanigan]

I've been looking back at the "yez/y'all" thread we spun in mid-December
and, at the risk of being redundant, I've picked out a few messages that
seem to tie up loose ends re. this singular/plural issue.  The recognition
that a core Deep South usage may change in its fringe or boundary areas
seems to me important.  Thus West Texas is not East Texas, and maybe
Tennessee and Kentucky (and southern Ohio) exhibit, and tolerate, more
singular "y'all" use than the South does.  And I'm not considering "frozen
idioms" here, of the "Y'all come back soon" variety.

The singular "yez/ye" issue is similar.  I had said I heard Ralph Stanley
use singular "ye," and someone else reported singular "yez" vs. plural
"youse" (in Irish English and in Irish-immigrant areas in America.  The
same might happen with "y'uns/yinz," though I haven't heard these used in
the singular.

I'll listen closely to Ralph Stanley when he comes to Athens in a couple of
weeks (with the Clinch Mt. Boys) and get back to you all!  (That's my
personal, and very comfortable, accommodation to the plural usage, btw.)

Beverly Flanigan
Ohio University

At 11:47 AM 12/13/2004, you wrote:
>I cannot supply anything in print, but I went to grad school with a gal
>from Kentucky (does that disqualify her from being a "genuine
>Southern-speaker"?) who claimed she used y'all as a singular and 'all
>y'all' as the plural (or does that fact that she uses "y'all" as a
>singular disqualify her from being a genuine Southern-speaker?).  I've
>always been amused at the discussions about singular 'y'all' on this list
>and elsewhere.  Most southeners claim that y'll cannot be singular.  But
>they seem to consider only their own dialect, or even idiolect, but not
>the fact that for other people or dialects the case might be different.
>Fritz J
>
> >>> wilson.gray at RCN.COM 12/10/04 07:58PM >>>
>On Dec 10, 2004, at 12:41 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> > Subject:      Re: Singular "yez"?
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------
> >
> > At 11:21 AM -0500 12/10/04, Alice Faber wrote:
> >>> From a posting in alt.folklore.urban:
> >>
> >>> In the Philly area (I am a recent immigrant) I swear that
> >>> there is a singular pronoun "yez". My family thinks I'm
> >>> hallucinating, or that maybe it's the Brooklynese "youse".
> >>> Neither is true. "Youse" is plural and is quite distinct
> >>> from what I'm hearing, e.g. "would yez like some coffee?"
> >>> AM I hallucinating?
> >>
> >>
> > Wonder if this is the same phenomenon as singular y'all, much
> > discussed here.  As I recall, there was no consensus on whether
> > so-called singular y'all generally involves an implicit reference to
> > others in some contextually understood set to which the singular
> > addressee belongs (e.g. 'you and your family', 'you and the horse you
> > came in with') or whether there's a regional and social
> > differentiation on this.
> >
> > Larry
> >
>
>Can someone supply some examples in which a genuine Southern-speaker or
>a BE speaker uses "y'all"/"you-all" as a singular? I've heard and read
>since the '40's, at least that, y'all/you-all can be used as a
>second-person singular. I have never heard such a use from any white
>Southerners or from any black  person. But I'm willing to grant that
>that could be mere happenstance.
>
>-Wilson Gray