origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Guy Letourneau]

I grew up on the Nawth Shaw (North Shore) of Massachusetts in the later
1960s. My family is French Canadian and my mother was born in Quebec
province. My father is second generation. English was my mother's second
language. She spoke with a strong accent her whole life.

Canadian French may have had an input here.

She and her siblings (my aunts and uncles) pronounced English 'th' as
'd' or 't' depending on whether the English 'th' was voiced or not.
So she said 'dem,' 'dare,' 'doze,' and 'dat' for 'them' 'there' 'those'
and 'that.'

There were odd exceptions when she would use a 'real' th for another
consonant, which proved that she could actually form the noise
correctly. (i.e, she had no physical impediments preventing her from
forming 'th' it would only come out at unusual instances.)

One example was that she would pronounce 'dirty' with (edth) for 'd' and
(thorn) for 't' but she pronounced 'thirty' as 'turdy' ( but not 'toidy.')

She very consistently reversed sounded and silent 'h' and would add
initial h to other words for h-emphasis. 'Wear ha-NAT' was an admonition
to wear a hat. Initial 't' + vowel could sometimes turn to unvoiced 'th'
+ vowel for emphasis: "Not da short one, I said get duh TH-all one" (for
'tall.')

The one time I remember her going ballistic at an officer during a
traffic stop (she has a lead-foot) who asked her if she had been
drinking. She was surprised at the question, but when the officer said
'because your speech sounds slurred' she really really fumed. YOU DARE!
("You there...")

- GLL

On 02/10/2012 09:00 PM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Subject:      origin of dese dem dose in NYCE
>>  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  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).=20
>>
>>  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.=20
>>
>>  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?=20
>
>>
>>  Michael Newman
>>  Associate Professor of Linguistics
>>  Queens College/CUNY
>>  michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu

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