antedating (?) "Katy, bar the door" (1890)

[Wilson Gray]

I don't know. I merely assumed, as your quote notes. I further assume
that the determination of "more marked" v. "less marked" takes far
more experience than I have, i.e. for all practical purposes, none
whatsoever, since I avoid eye-dialect BE as written by whites on GP
and, WRT eye-dialect WE, Erskine Caldwell, MacKinlay Kantor, and Manly
Wade Wellman are about as far as I care to go, though I enjoy hearing
all Southern and Southern-based dialects, whether white or black,
especially the drawled and r-less varieties, spoken or sung. If you
haven't heard "Finger-Poppin' Time" done by the the black Midnighters
and the cover by the white Stanley Brothers, you're missing a treat,
if for no other reason than the stylistic contrast between the two
versions.

FWIW, I've paid money to hear the Stanleys in person.

-Wilson

On 10/3/07, 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: antedating (?) "Katy, bar the door" (1890)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 10/3/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 10/3/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> > > 1888 _Current Literature_ Dec. 499/1 When she say that, hits 'Katy,
> > > bar ther do', then, fer she's gwineter do it.
> >
> > I assume that the passage is a bit of eye-dialect BE.
>
> I didn't see anything in this story ("Chunk" by Lum Duke, from the
> Atlanta Constitution) explicitly mentioning the race of the
> protagonists, Tom Hubbard and his beloved Mary Elizabeth (aka Chunk).
> They're described as rural Georgia folk  -- she had "always lived hid
> away in the pine mountains on the Chattahoochee River." When such
> 19th-century stories featured black characters, they tended to be more
> "marked" -- unless, of course, the eye-dialect itself was intended as
> evidence of racial markedness.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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