Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Mullins, Bill AMRDEC]

Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

I believe I have heard "I done bin told you", but I don't recall if it
was from a black speaker, or a white guy parodying AAVE.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
Behalf Of
> Wilson Gray
> Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 4:14 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN"
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN"
>
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------
> -
>
> Twenty-ish black male speaker:
>
> "Whils' dey was fightin' ova me, I _sot_ an' watch'.
>
>
> The first time that I've ever heard the, IMO till now,
> semi-mythological verb-form.
>
> Unfortunately, there was no clue, beyond "the country" (rural South)
> as to where this speaker was from.
>
>
> Late-thirty-ish black male speaker:
>
> "I BIN _told_ you! I been _told_ you since Christmas!"
>
>
> I didn't know that this syntactic structure, WRT to tense, existed,
> till I heard John's paper on it at the first NWAV. Had I only read his
> paper somewhere, so that I couldn't see that its author was black, I
> would have dismissed it as nothing other than more "White Mischief,"
> to quote the title of an old movie. Ain't *nobody* be saying nothing
> like that!
>
> "In *my* grammar," to coin a phrase, it ain't nothing possible b'sep':
>
> "I BIN _telling_ you! I been _telling_ since Christmas!"
> --
> -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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Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: NONE

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