Heard on The Judges: " -nim" in possessive

[Wilson Gray]

Larry, if you catch an AA speaker saying [nEm] instead of [nIm], kill
him, for he is a traitor to his dialect, a disgrace to his race. :-)

-Wilson
–––
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.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 10:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Judges: " -nim" in possessive
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9:30 AM -0500 1/29/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Judge Penny (late-forty-ish black woman from Atlanta):
>>
>>"How you gon' have five girlfriends and be so broke that you still
>>livin' in _yo' mama-nim house_?!"
>>
>>
>>I've never heard it expressed this way, before. I would have expected:
>>
>>"... still livin' in the house _wit' cho' mama-nim_?!"
>>
>>
> also rendered (for varieties of EA (and AA?) speakers in Pittsburgh
> and environs as well as southerners of all ethnicities) as "mamanem"
> and "mommanem", which are slightly more transparent (< 'n' (th)'em)
>
> LH
>
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