low back merger--austentacious

[Wilson Gray]

Very interesting, Robin!

There seems to have been a change from my childhood seventy years ago
to today. My impression is that, currently, "ordinary" - if you
understand what I'm trying to say - black people more and more seem to
be moving to "you is" or "you's" for the singular, wheras "you-all" or
"y'all" is still used for the plural. In my childhood and youth, only
children and "country folk" used "you is, you's" for the singular.

It strikes me as strange. If the singular "you (are)" is already
distinct from the plural "you-all (are), y'all (are)," where's the
motivation for a new singular, "you (is)"?

Well, "is" is "singular" and "are" is plural. But no speaker of any
version of this dialect, IME, is obligated to use the verb _to be_,
except, perhaps, when talking to white people. But not even white
people are *obligated* to use the verb _to be_ ,when speaking
informally.

Well, who knows?

-Wilson

On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Robin Hamilton
<robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton2 at BTINTERNET.COM>
> Subject:      Re: low back merger--austentacious
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>> 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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--
-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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