Another phenomenon of Saint Louis BE: Flap into Trill

[Paul Johnston]

Interesting, Wilson.  Glaswegians do something similar--in fact, it's
a stereotype there, pretty much confined to working-class speech
within the city boundaries.  It's related to a more widespread T-to-R
rule, sporadic in Scotland and the far North of England, usual in the
rest of the North--a Northern British analog to our own T-flapping
rule and an earlier alternative to glottalization to >[?t] or [?]
wherever it occurs.

AAVE has some interesting glottalization rules too: one of my
memories of returning to this country was of a Brooklyn-born rapper
and AAVE speaker (I forget which one) saying his real first name was
Martin = [mA:?In], pronounced exactly as in Cockney.  I know that
this can form by glottalization before syllabic /n/ (which most New
York area speakers have, including me) followed by reinsertion of an
unstressed vowel, which would be /I/, but it's the first time I ever
heard ANY American have glottal stop in intervocalic position.

Paul Johnston
On Jun 1, 2009, at 10:35 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Another phenomenon of Saint Louis BE: Flap into Trill,
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>
> While browing hrough the iTunes holdings, I came a across a jam called
> S.T.L.O.U.I.S., by an unknown artist - i.e. the record label has lost
> track of or never knew his name . In his rap, everywhere that you
> would expect a flap, this guy replaces it with the sound spelled #rV-,
> -VrrV, or -VrC- in Spanish: hard liquor > harr(!) liquor (possibly
> some other phenomenon), gotta > gorra, shouda > shourra, better >
> berra, etc.
>
> Much else has changed, since my youth, there. A city that once had a
> population of nearly 900,000 now has a population just over 300,000.
> The rapper, as do all Saint Louis rappers that I've ever listened to,
> makes referernce to the intersection of Kingshighway [Blvd] and
> Natural Bridge [Rd], giving me the impression that this is now the
> center of black night life in Saint Louis. Not back in the day! I'm
> quite familiar with Kingshighway, up to a point. But I'd have to look
> on a map to find Natural Bridge.
>
> Kingshighway began as "el Camino real," when the area was under the
> control of Spain (cf., e.g. DeSoto, MO, and [San Juan de] Pelosi, MO.)
> But I have no idea how Natural Bridge came to get its name. There may
> have been a natural bridge in the area, but that area was then so far
> beyond the boundaries of the colored part of town that I was never
> motivated to concern myself with the solution to this conundrum.
>
> -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
>
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