Brooklynese in N.O.

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 14, 2005, at 12:24 PM, Jon Lighter wrote:

> "Y'awl. It's pure Brooklynese. Reported dying out in New York City."
>
> Noted.

i'll second that raised eyebrow.

> ....Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 11:56:58 -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
>> Has anybody traced the origin of the "middle-school teacher" legend ?
>> "Middle school" itself is a middle 20th C. concept, right ?
>
> Here's one data point (with transplanted workers instead of teachers):
>
> -----
> "Brooklynese, Y'awl", Washington Post, Oct 13, 1974, p. G12
> Dis, dat, mudda, fadda, woik, and y'awl. It's pure Brooklynese,
> reported
> dying out in New York City but flourishing in a New Orleans melting
> pot
> called the Irish Channel. ...
> No one seems to know when they began mangling vowels and slashing
> consonants in the finest Brooklyn tradition.
> "Some say a boatload of workers came down from New York before the
> turn of
> the century and stayed, but that's just a theory," says Dr. George
> Reinecke, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans.

another folk assumption about language here: dialect differences and
similarities are facts about individual words.  so "dis, dat, mudda,
fadda" count as  -- wow! -- four similarities between the dialects,
rather than just one, stopping of dh.  and that's a dialect feature
that's all *over* the place in the english-speaking world.

so we're left with the famous "oi", one very widespread feature of
nonstandard varieties of english, and "yawl".  anybody have evidence
on the use of "y'all" in brooklyn in the late 19th century?

i think we're basically back to just "oi".

arnold, underwhelmed