origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Michael Newman]

Thanks for all that responded so far. As for Dan's comment, that's what I am trying to determine. After all, correlation is not causality, and 1) I can find no other non-lexical feature surviving from Dutch in NYCE, and 2) the Dutch /d/ and /t/ are qualitatively different from the NYCE fortition of (dh) and (th) as per place of articulation and also degree of aspiration (according to Labov 1966). In any case, they probably wouldn't be confused (particularly /dh/) in running speech.

Following up Jonathan's observation (and particularly thanks for that cite which I guarantee will appear in my NYCE book), I started to read Horatio Alger. In Ragged Dick, the title character is a native NYer, and he's depicted as saying the fricative form whereas in Phil the Fiddler, that title character, an Italian immigrant and a minor character called Tim Rafferty who is elsewhere depicted as using recognizably Irish pronunciation as well are shown with <d> and <t> for (dh) and (th). The only evidence against Alger's fidelity to local pronunciation is that Dick doesn't use ANY recognizably NYCE features so far. He only has reductions of various sorts shown below, some of which are not transparent:

partic'lar (p16)
reg'lar (p19)
valooble (p. 19
fortun (p19)

On the other hand, the NYCE features that would have been in a street kids NYCE would likely have been vocalic, and it might have been beyond Alger's ability to put them in pseudophonetic form that would be recognizable to his teenage boy readership if he could do it at all. That said, he was apparently quite familiar with street boys' speech.


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



On Feb 12, 2012, at 2:02 AM, Dan Goncharoff wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: origin of dese dem dose in NYCE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> 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
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>>
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