low back merger--austentacious

[Robin Hamilton]

> Somethings I do notice, though. Here in NEPA, people use "youse"
> [j^z]. When I was a kid in Saint Louis, white people actually
> pronounced "youse" as thought it was spelled "use." (Or maybe not. I
> was fresh from Texas, in those days, where everyone used "you-all
> y'all" and "youse" may have struck me as [juz] because I'd never heard
> it before, *except* as a pronunciation of "use.". (Black speakers used
> "you-all, y'all," needless to say.)
>
> -Wilson

As a curious aspect of the parallel between AAVE and urban Glasgow, both
speeches seem to have preserved the distinction between the second person
singular and the second person plural, with an optional marker sometimes
used to emphasise the plural form.

Thus, for "you"/"you-all", we find in urban Glasgow:

        yir oot uh yir heid                              ("yir" - singular
SE unmarked "you")
        youze are are aw oot uh yir heids     ("youze" - plural SE unmarked
"you")

(As an aside, the yir/youze distinction seems to be part of the speech of
*both Glasgow Catholics and Glasgow Protestants, unlike "yin"/"wan" [for SE
"one"], which *is a distinctive linguistic marker separating those two
varieties of Glasgow language.)

Two things baffle me about this (but then I'm easily baffled) -- (1) how and
why exactly did the useful non-contextual marking of singular vs. plural in
the second person pronoun disappear from most varieties of English Speech?
And (2), why is the preservation of this (as in the yir/youze distinction in
Glasgow urban [and elsewhere]) not seen as an obvious linguistic benefit?

{The loss of the thou/you singular/plural distinction in the second person
pronoun seems to have been replaced in *some English speeches with a
differentiation *within the pronunciation of "you", but not in others.}

(I realise that I may not have got this right, in <at least> two ways -- the
possibility of (1) "you-all" as (generally) Southern USAmerican (rather than
Northern USA) rather than AAVE (rather than SA).  Or (2) "you-all" as
possibly applied to a single addressee.  It seemed simpler to risk display
my ignorance by deploying this as an [implicit] question rather than trying
to, inadequately, chase down the answer for myself.)

Robin

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