The East L.A. accent

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Nancy Friedman
<nancyf at wordworking.com> wrote:> Chicano English
"How ardently they love, and how soon they forget."
That articles reads as though the (formerly?) internationally-known
Richard Anthony "Cheech" Marin, who spread Chicano-talk around the
world as the "Mexican" half of Cheech & Chong, had not existed. And
he's not even dead! Indeed, he's a dekkid younger than I am.
I can recall when only we colored used _homeboy_ and it meant only
someone who was also from "home," the same Southern town or, at least,
the same Southern state, that you were from yourself, instead of, even
in the mouths of rappers, any random body from any random where. --
-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 Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: The East L.A. accent
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Oct 25, 2011, at 11:25 AM, Nancy Friedman wrote:
>
>> Article in today's L.A. Times about "Chicano English" and about Pitzer
>> College linguistics professor Carmen Fought, who studies it.
>>
>>
>>
>> http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-eastla-accent-20111025,0,987605.stor
>> y
>>
>> ...
>>>> The word "barely" is often used to indicate that something just happened,
>> as in: "I barely got out of the hospital."<<
>>
>>
>>
>> (Could that "barely" come from the Spanish verb acabar-"to just finish"?)
>>
> A colleague, Scott Schwenter, who specializes in Spanish and linguistic variation and has also worked a lot on approximatives (= 'almost'/"casi", 'barely'/"apenas") cross-linguistically, writes:
> ========================
> That definitely comes from the (mainly Northern? and rural?) Mexican use of 'apenas' ('barely') which is used in temporal contexts in much the same way: "Apenas llegué"  = lit. I barely arrived = 'I just got here'. I don't think 'acabar de' + Inf has that interpretation.
> ========================
>
> LH
>
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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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org