Sound-change in BE

[Wilson Gray]

I was thinking cross-contextually, but I consider your example to be
salient, nevertheless. This shift makes me wonder how much social
control has to do with language change. When I hear, e.g. "now"
pronounced as "naow," it fairly screams "Peckerwood lynch mob!" at me.
Clearly, it doesn't draw that same visceral response among the younger
coloreds. OTOH, even when I was a teen in the '50's, this "aow" sound
was common among teen-aged black girls in words like "ow now how
thousand bow how about out" etc.

This reminds me of something else. Joking sppeech among men tends to
be "hyper-blackenized," in this case, it takes the form of applying a
similar shift to long/tense "o" as in "flow." A prime example is
provided by the R&B song, "Riot in Cell Block no.9," in which the
soloist is the late, great Richard Berry, who wrote and originally
recorded the legendary "Louie, Louie." Its eye-dialect version is
something like the following:

Thih ride stahdid in sail block numbuh faow
Sprayid lak fi' acrost dih prison flaow
Dih wawdn sayid, "C'moan out witcho hanes up in dih A-uh
if you doank come out, you-all goang git dih chA-uh"
At five o'clock, the tee-uh gayss got owuh mee-in
But ev'rih now 'n' thee-in
ThA-uhz a ride gawin' oan
ThA-uhz a ride gawin' oan
Up in sail block numbuh nine

wherein "A" = aesc.

-Wilson



On 1/30/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Sound-change in BE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 1/29/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > When I was a child, I never heard the sound commonly represented in
> > eye-dialect as "aow" used by any black speaker. When I was a young
> > man, I noticed that my female contemporaries had begun to use "aow."
> > Now, I hear "aow" used by black men. Cf., e.g. Dave Chappelle, as one
> > egregious example.
>
> Are we talking about a diphthong (triphthong?) used
> cross-contextually, or just used on its own as an interjection? If the
> latter, here's an example of eye-dialectal "aow" which would
> corroborate your perception of a gender distinction, from Gang Starr's
> 1994 album _Hard to Earn_ (this particular line is by guest rapper Lil
> Dap):
>
> "Make the chicks say 'aow' and the brothers say 'ho'."
> http://www.ohhla.com/anonymous/gngstarr/hard_to/speak_ya.gsr.txt
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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