origin of dese dem dose in NYCE

[Michael Newman]

There certainly were major differences in Eastern Europe and these differences remain actually in Brooklyn among different Chasidic sects with different origins. That's made clear in Fader, Ayala. 2007. Reclaiming Sacred Sparks: Linguistic Syncretism and Gendered Language Shift among Hasidic Jews in New York. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 17(1): 1–22,

In addition, what's relevant to (dh) and (th), most but not all varieties of Yiddish in Eastern Europe had dental rather than alveolar /d/ and /t/ according to the following atlas: 

 Herzog, Marvin, Vera Baviskar, Andrew Sunshine, Ulrike Kiefer, Robert Neumann, Wolfgang Putschke, Uriel Weinreich. 1992. The Language and culture atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, Vol. 1. NY: YIVO/ Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.


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



On Feb 12, 2012, at 7:41 PM, Victor Steinbok wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: origin of dese dem dose in NYCE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> It would be too strong a claim to say that no Polish Gentiles immigrated
> to NYC, but far greater numbers of them went to other places, especially
> compared to Polish Jews.
> 
> Yiddish has dialects, just like any other language. To some extent,
> these are influenced by the local languages which many Yiddish speakers
> used regularly. I've witnessed a number of disagreements on Yiddish
> pronunciation between people whose families came from Poland/Lithuania
> and Russia/Ukraine or from German-speaking territories, although most of
> those concerned vowels, not consonants. My grandparents' families came
> from different regions (more North/South than East/West) and they could
> understand each other perfectly, but my early childhood recollections
> are that they sounded somewhat different when they spoke Yiddish. The
> differences aren't quite as drastic as between Ashkenaz, Sephard and
> Yemenite Hebrew, but why would one assume no geographic variation or no
> second-language influence? It's much harder to tell today, with native
> Yiddish centers being NYC and Israel, rather than Vienna, Lwow and
> Odessa. But does it mean that those differences never existed? There are
> plenty of dialects in England over a smaller territory. So why not Yiddish?
> 
>     VS-)
> 
> On 2/11/2012 7:38 PM, Dan Nussbaum wrote:
>> Do you mean no Polish Gentiles immigrated to New York City?
>> 
>> 
>> Also, since Yiddish was the first language of most Eastern European Jews, why would the language of their neighbors influence their pronunciation of any language other than those neighbors.
>> 
>> 
>> Dan Nussbaum
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org