Brooklynese in N.O.

[Wilson Gray]

On 9/14/05, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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

Your mother's pronunciation of "girl" is very cloose to the "standard"
BE pronunciation in East Texas. As children, we were forbidden to use
"gal" as being "low-class." To this day, some sixty years later, I
find the use of "gal" to refer to a girl/woman to be, somehow,
insulting. It's not as bad as "bitch," etc., but it's definitely, for
me, not a term to be used casually, despite the fact that that's
exactly the way that 99.44% of speakers use it.

-Wilson Gray

> On Wednesday, September 14, 2005, at 03:20  PM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>
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> > 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
>


--
-Wilson Gray