Brooklynese in N.O.

[Jonathan Lighter]

As a non-Brooklyn New Yorker who has a friend who grew up in N.O., I may as well add that superficially she sounds more like (many) New Yorkers than do most people.

To me the most obvious difference, which I noticed immediately,  is her "aw" for my "ah," so my name comes out "jawn" rather than "jahn."

Elsewhere, she sometimes approaches / 3 / but doesn't quite reach it.  It's still closer to / ^r /. I've always have / ^r /.

Has anybody traced the origin of the "middle-school teacher" legend ?  "Middle school" itself is a middle 20th C. concept, right ?

JL

Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Benjamin Zimmer
Subject: Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:05:04 -0400, Wilson Gray wrote:

>It sounds like utter bullshit to me. The ^r > oi/oi > ^r alternation
>is a commonplace in the South, not just in New Orleans, at least in
>black speech. Get out your old Temptations 45's and notice how often
>you hear "oi" for "^r" and the reverse. This has been documented at
>least as far back as1966, in the book, _Five Smooth Stones_, by Ann
>Fairbairn, in which, in an aside, she notes this as a typical feature
>of New Orleans BE.

I've often wondered about the distribution of the palatal upglide to
replace /r/ after a stressed mid-central vowel (I'll use /3/ here, the
SAMPA equivalent for "reversed epsilon"). It's my impression that in
dialects of the Deep South, the upglide is most common before a nasal. So
for instance Mississippi-born Robert Johnson used the upglide in
"Milkcow's Calf Blues" ("your milk is turnin /t3jn at n/ blue"), as did
Mississippi-born Muddy Waters in "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had"
("Had a sweet little home, it got burnt /b3jnt/ down, people ain't that
bad"). Presumably this is what Berkeley-born John Fogerty was shooting for
in "Proud Mary" ("Big wheel keep on turnin /t3jn at n/, Proud Mary keep on
burnin /b3jn at n/").


--Ben Zimmer


---------------------------------
Yahoo! for Good
 Click here to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.