query re AAVE

[Wilson Gray]

I'm tempted to say, "You can *not* be serious!" :-) The change of
word-final /-Vt/ to [-Vk], even when the syllable has a strong
secondary stress, is stereotypical of BE as I knew it in Saint Louis.
The Comet Theater, a movie house serving the local black population,
was universally known as the Comic The-ade-uh. Locally, "vomit" was
always "vomic." "Run ik  saw ik  done ik"? Of course! A friend of
mine, Sam, now sadly passed on to his just reward, used to brag that
he had a potnuh, referring to your humble correspondent, of course,
who could "speak Hih-tyke." (Sam was one of those rare individuals who
got as much pleasure out of exaggerating the accomplishments of his
friends as he got out of exaggerating his own accomplishmets.)

As a matter of fact, I've BIN knowing about this phenomenon! ;-) I
even thought that it was universal. But, the fact of the matter is
that, even on the West Coast, the majority of my friends were other
former St. Louisans. That probably interfered with my noticing any
other dialectal variants.

-Wilson

On 7/17/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      query re AAVE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> stanford student doug kenter reports to me a black rapper (from NYC)
> who at least sometimes has /k/ for word-final /t/, as in "vomick" for
> "vomit" and "run ick" for "run it".  this was news to both john
> rickford and me.  i eventually devised a hypothesis about how you
> might get there from here: lots of speakers not only glottalize word-
> final voiceless stops, but also sometimes neutralize word-final [t']
> and [k'] to a glottal stop; someone hearing the glottal stop has to
> figure out how to "restore" the point of articulation, and could
> easily get it wrong sometimes.  (i'm ruling out the possibility of
> some substratum effect from hawaiian or a similar language with /t/
> and /k/ both mapped onto [k].  first, because it seems so socially
> unlikely in this case, and second, because the effect is only in word-
> final position, not across the board.)
>
> does this phenomenon look (well, sound) familiar to anybody here?
> wilson?
>
> arnold
>
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