Brooklynese in N.O.

[Wilson Gray]

Hear, hear, arnold! Deserving of the last word, as is so often the case.

-Wilson

On 9/14/05, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>


--
-Wilson Gray