origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Dan Goncharoff]

I am very confused. I was under the impression that the use of
articles starting with a d instead of th started in NYC about 350
years ago, when the town was called New Amsterdam. The Dutch never
left, and I suspect their influence on the NY accent didn't, either.

DanG



On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 7:27 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: origin of dese dem dose in NYCE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>> 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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>
>
>
> --
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