Another phenomenon of Saint Louis BE: Flap into Trill

[Wilson Gray]

Back in the daay, I knew exactly one black person who used a glottal
stop: a fellow GI, later, my roommate in L.A., from Holly Springs, a
suburb of Fuquay Springs, in Wake County, NC. You would have thought
that he had studied glottal-stoppage at some London school of dialect.
An exchange between him and me - or is that "between he and I"?;-)

A. David, how come you always be usin' a glottal stop?

B. Man, I don't use no glo?al stop!

I usually asked David about his use of the glottal two or three times
a year, just for laughs. It *still* cracks me up to think of his use
of a glo?al stop in his denial fo his use of a glo?al stop!

Could his use of a glottal stop have been a speech defect, I sometimes
wonder. Until the spread of of hip hop, the use of a glottal stop in
BE anywhere except where it occurs in standard English - if it does,
was unknown, at least to me.. I can't think of any place where it
occurs, off hand. But, of course, dialect features that you've heard
and used throughout your life don't exactly leap out at you.

Since the coming of iTunes, I've amassed a large number of old-time
black speech and singing and I've never heard a glottal stop. OTOH,
I've now heard "gwine" used by black *Texans*! Well, by Texas
country-blues singers, at least. Once upon a time, about the time that
I began to post here, in fact, I would never have believed that
"gwine" was ever used in Texas. Back in the '40's and '50's I heard
people speak who were in their 60's, 70's, and 80's, without ever
hearing a single "gwine." I didn't come across until I learned to read
the "negro dialect" of my youth. I've never gotten the hang of Uncle
Remus, though I was able to get the hang of Poe's negro dialect, as
used in, i.e. The Gold-Bug, though, at the time, I didn't immediately
understand that there was a special reason that the black servant's
speech was spelled differently from the speech of his white master.

-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 Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Another phenomenon of Saint Louis BE: Flap into Trill
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Interesting, Wilson. Â Glaswegians do something similar--in fact, it's
> a stereotype there, pretty much confined to working-class speech
> within the city boundaries. Â 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. Â 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:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Another phenomenon of Saint Louis BE: Flap into Trill,
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---------
>>
>> 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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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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