origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Victor Steinbok]

This is a personal, not particularly systematic observation, but
Russian/Yiddish ESL speakers tend to have a somewhat different pattern.
Moving "th" toward the dental stop seems to be the mark of the less
confident speakers or newbies. The more confident, more fluent speakers
with thick accents tend to move it toward dental sibilants, so they
sound more like, "Zis is somesing I got from ze supermarket." And this
remains with most of them for decades if not permanently, no matter how
fluent they are. Polish [t] and [d] are quite different from Russian, so
Polish/Yiddish speakers might have a different pattern and that would
certainly fall right into the 1870s-80s as an immigrant group (although
the bulk of them came later, along with the Galician and Russian
Jews--and the Polish Slavic contingent did not go to NYC at all), but
the same could be said about NYC Irish and Italians, timewise. Russian
ESL speakers also often swap voiceless and voiced t/d and s/z and
shorten long vowels (which makes the "changing the shits" a common joke
in Russian immigrant circles) which is rarely reproduced correctly in
cinematic versions of "Russian" accents (with the classic bad
stereotypes being Walter Koenig's Chekov and Boris & Natasha--there
seems to be a whole school for bad "Russian" accents, often making
people sound more French or Dutch than Russian).

     VS-)

On 2/10/2012 7:27 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> Since I haven't done a careful analysis, all I can do is offer an
> impression, based on what now seem like centuries of examining
> vernacular American literature.
>
> My impression and educated guess is that the  "dese, dem, and dose"
> phenomenon is not represented in white NYC speech (and in comical
> contexts only) until the late 1880s. Within a decade it was a cliche'.
>
> It was specifically associated with the Bowery and a little later the
> Lower East Side, just as more recently it has been deemed specially
> typical of Brooklyn.  Pressed further, I'd say it was most usually
> associated with first- or second-generation Irish, Jewish, and Italian
> immigrants.
>
> An early ex.:
>
> 1887 _Tid-Bits_ (Jan. 15) 2: A can of benzine exploded in a Bowery
> eating house the other day and the proprietor yelled down the kitchen
> companion-way - "If yer spill any more of dat coffee I'll massacree
> yer!"
>
> Needless to say, the forms "dis," "dat," "dese," "dem," and "dose" had
> long been staples of printed representations of AAVE everywhere.
>
> JL

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