Brooklynese in N.O.

[Paul Johnston]

I'd think that TH-stopping could come from any number of sources, incl.
AAVE and Cajun L2 varieties of English.  In the North, it's VERY
widespread as an urban phenomenon (as well as where German or
Scandinavian influence can plainly be invoked) & in pronouns, it's a
London and Southeastern British English feature too.  Certainly, there's
a lot of mutual reinforcement going on in an ethnically diverse city
such as New Orleans and none of it has to involve NY English of any kind.
I'm not sure about the [3i] forms in work, etc, except that as has been
pointed out, it's certainl,y common in a lot of Southern AAVE (at least
historically), though what distribution geographically, I'm not sure.
Certainly in Texas and the Gulf states.  How it got there I don't know,
and even its genesis in NY is a topic of debate, though the usual
suspects (Irish, Yiddish-speaking Jews) don't make sense.  Roger Lass's
theory, that it can evolve any place you get a palatalized realization
of /r/, makes the most sense to me and this too could happen,
theoretically, anyplace in America you don't have retroflex /r/'s.  (It
happens in Randstad Dutch too  e. g.  maar  = [ma:i], door = [do:i], but
you can't invoke this even for Nieuw Amsterdam as it seems to be a 20c.
change).  But how did the /r/'s get palatalized in the first place?  And
why the favoring before /n/, if any?  (I hear it in blues songs a lot
before other alveolars, too, i.e.  hurt = [h3it], heard = [h3id], both
from Muddy Waters).

Finally, as most New Yorkers know, these features are called
"Brooklynese", but can be found among working-class speakers of any of
the five boroughs, plus Hudson  County, NJ, where I think the [3i]
survives better than in NYC itself, and you still can find the [^i]
variant around. Diphthongs of the [3i] type and various compromise forms
with lengthened first elements used to go much farther upscale socially
too.  I used to tease my mother, silk stocking Manhattan Irish as she
was (b. 1904) about forms like girl= [g3.il] (and th i should be a
superscript).

Yours,
Paul Johnston
On Wednesday, September 14, 2005, at 03:20  PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

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