origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Michael Newman]

Ok, people can make all kinds of claims on websites, but I ran into one on NYCE that had me wondering. The claim is that the  fortition of (dh) and (th) (i.e., the pronunciation of dental fricatives as dental stops leading the stereotypical dese, dem, dose, and I suppose tree for 3, etc. is ascribed to originally the Dutch, which of course has no such interdental fricatives. If this were true, it would be just about the only Dutch substrate effect on NYCE outside the lexicon (which anyway is pretty much either gone or spread far more widely, as in stoop and cruller). 

Now, there are two reasons to imagine that the Dutch probably had nothing to do with it. First there are plenty of other contact languages that don't have dental fricatives. Second, the NYCE stops are dental not alveolar. I understand that Dutch has (unlike say Yiddish and Italian) alveolar not dental /d/ and /t/. Still it's possible, I suppose. 

Does anyone know of early 19th or even 18th Century mentions of this pronunciation, which is not all that common in North America outside of Irish, French, and Spanish contact dialects? 





Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu

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