Brooklynese in N.O.

[Jonathan Lighter]

Does anybody have good evidence of just how far back this Brooklyn diphthong goes in the NYC area ?

JL

"Mullins, Bill" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Mullins, Bill"
Subject: Re: Brooklynese in N.O.
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>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.

You may have seen an old episode of "Saturday Night Live" in which
Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest played two old Negro League baseball
players, in blackface. One or the other of them talked about playing
in Birmingham, and "bir" came out like "buoy" -- Buoyminham.
Is this the same pronounciation?


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