Antedating of spiggoty/spigotty (1900)

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>2. But I always took "No spikka [di] English" as an Italian caricature, not
>a Spanish one. ISTM that epenthetic final vowels are a marker of
>stage/caricature Italian accents, and prothetic initial ones of Spanish
>ones; "spikka" goes with Italian at both ends. (Initial [sp-] is perfectly
>acceptable in Italian, but in Spanish it becomes [Esp-].) Can we resolve the
>apparent contradiction?

I don't take the expression as anything other than English. The usual full
expression, I suppose would be "[I] speak [the] English" (taxi driver or
merchant trying to do business, etc.) or "I don't speak [the] English"
(maybe sometimes "No speak [the] English") (non-English-speaker responding
to question or request in English). No doubt there was a wide range of
pronunciations, from perfect US-style English to utter silence or pure
Spanish from those who knew no English at all. What would be memorable to
the new arrivals would be the recognizable but accented pronunciations in
the middle of the spectrum. Stereotypes aside, I don't know what percentage
of Puerto Ricans would have had difficulty with initial /sp/ or the /kd/ in
"speak de". But it looks to me like the overall impression was that the
locals said "spickety" or "spiggety" or so a lot. Maybe for every local who
said "No speaka de English" there were ten who said "I don' speak English"
... but the unremarkable latter version would be ignored in deriving the
slang epithet, I think. Any need for a vowel before /sp/ may have been
fulfilled by preceding "I" etc. in many cases too. This is just my
speculation and I don't claim any relevant expertise.

-- Doug Wilson