Brooklynese in N.O.

[Wilson Gray]

On 9/14/05, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The so-called "Brooklyn diphthong" in words like "girl," "world," etc., seems to be extremely difficult for non-users to imitate.  They always make it come out like "oy," which it very rarely is ( though cf. Jackie Mason).

This could be because they know it primarily from reading it in
eye-dialect and not from actually hearing it. I'm not certain that
I've ever heard it spoken by native speakers, unless the dialect(s)
used by the Eastside Kids/Bowery Boys in that series of movies
count(s). And there was the guy on radio whose catchphrase was,
"[Placename?!] I useta woik in that town!"

> It becomes even harder when, as very often, it's followed by a semi-retroflex "r."

> To my ear, it is not quite the same as the Southern diphthong used by, e.g., the late Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

I heard that! That is, I agree with you. :-)

And, lest anyone misunderstand, I really do make the claim that, in my
childhood, black people in Marshall, Texas, did pronounce, e.g. "burn"
as "boin" and, e.g. "coin" as "kern," abstracting away from the actual
phonetic representations. Butchawl get the picture.

-Wilson

> The "dh" for "th" seems to me to be far more common in N.Y.C. than "d" for "th."
>
> Very notable similarities between much N.O. and N.Y.C. pronunciation are the parallel "r-dropping" and the relative lack of diphthongization in N.O. compared with much of the Gulf South.
>
> JL
>
> "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
> Subject: Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sep 14, 2005, at 1:48 PM, Peter McGraw reports:
>
> > --On Wednesday, September 14, 2005 12:43 PM -0700 "Arnold M. Zwicky"
> > wrote:
> >
> >> anybody have evidence
> >> on the use of "y'all" in brooklyn in the late 19th century?
> >
> > Well, I did hear that some of the workers took their boat (a yawl, no
> > doubt) and went back to Brooklyn.
>
> i believe they were escaping from the yaws, a disease resulting from
> the highly contagious vocalization of postvocalic [l].
>
> arnold
>
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--
-Wilson Gray