antedating "hobo" 1885

[Randy Alexander]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>Hmm...For me, that's not <CoCo> but <C [diphthong]o>
>> >
>> >Sorry; I've been using angle brackets for written forms. <CoCo> means
>> >a word written as any consonant letter + "o" + a consonant letter +
>> >"o", and I'm looking from the perspective of a reader of the cite.
>>
>> Well, technically, I would argue that in <boyo>, the <y> is not a
>> "consonant letter", but a vowel letter, which is why I invoked the
>> diphthonginess factor. Ā (Weren't we always taught that the vowels are
>> "a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y"? Ā And isn't this one of those times?
>> Or is that just for "cycle", "by", and such?) Ā So if the boyo is
>> wearing a diphthong, he's got only one consonant letter to his name.
>>
> I don't think the 1885 readers of the cite would have been thinking in
> those terms.

Why not?  Consciously or not they would have to divide it somewhere,
and there only seem to be two choices: boy-o and bo-yo.  If you think
1885 readers would favor the latter (if I'm understanding you
correctly that way), I'm curious as to why you would think so.

Growing up, I was taught "a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y", and
was always puzzled as to why "w" was included because while it's
common for "y" to be a vowel by itself, the only words that I could
find where "w" was a vowel by itself were Welsh words like "cwm" or
"cwtch", and I couldn't imagine that such obscure words would be
included in the "rule".  It wasn't until I started writing a reading
textbook that I realized the rule must be referring to the
combinations "ow", "ew", and "aw", but if that's so, then what about
"l" and "r" in "walk", or "more"?

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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