origin of dese dem dose in NYCE (and now youse)

[Michael Newman]

RB  hits the nail on the head. This is what I've learned from this very helpful discussion and my own foray into documents:  Fortition emerges in documentation of White NYers   in the mouths of English learners and Irish English speakers around the 1860s and in native speakers in 1880s-1890s. (on a tangent BTW, Crane in the 1890s has a German ways /θ/ as [s] in Maggie, Girl of the Streets. )

This is what I want to add here: This emergence seems to take place simultaneously with the emergence of other features. One I'm looking at now is Youse (often spelled yehs). Crane has speakers using this as a singular. An article in a lit journal on this novel (Slotkin, Alan 1990 "You as a multileveled dictional device in Stephen Crane's Representation of Bowery Dialect in Maggie: A girl  of the streets) in South Central Review, 7(2): 40-53.) discusses Crane's use of "yehs" as alternatively a singular and plural. He ascribes this to Irish English influence and refers as a source Irish folk literature. He gets a bit confused about some finer linguistic points. He's right that Crane uses this pronoun this way, but I suspect Crane was either misrepresenting the dialect and/or was concerned mainly concerned with its emblematic use, that is representing these characters' origins and exoticness. 

Of course, we know that plural 2p pronouns tend to wind up with 1p reference, but I find it hard to believe that this would vanish. It's basically undoing a merge, isn't it? In present day NYCE, I'm sure I've never heard such a thing. 


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



On Feb 13, 2012, at 5:55 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ronald Butters <ronbutters at AOL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: origin of dese dem dose in NYCE
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Interesting. Can you really hear a difference between Swedish vowels and =
> Finnish? I also wonder how many of the "Finns" actually were Swedish =
> speakers.
> 
> The point, of course, is that substrate influences would, as JL notes, =
> come from many different potential sources, reinforced by (or even =
> predominantly the result of) the fact that even the English have =
> "trouble" with "th". Looking for Dutch or Yiddish or Finnish or Italian =
> or Slavic or even African "substrate" is more or less a dead end.
> 
> On Feb 13, 2012, at 11:40 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> 
>> If you listen to the Youpertalk albums, you can tell there's a strong =
> influence from Finnish, in the vowels as well as the absence of dental =
> fricatives.  It may vary for different areas of the U.P., and of course =
> some of the Finnish or Swedish immigrants to the U.P. may have spent =
> time in Canada en route, but I don't know if I'd be capable of detecting =
> a "Canadian substrate", whatever that would amount to.  Also the =
> Youpertalk albums have some songs such in Finnish.  None in Canadian.  I =
> can't detect any Irish influences in the speech patterns, as opposed to, =
> say, speech patterns in early 20th c. New York or Boston English.  I =
> admit, this is pretty impressionistic stuff.
> 
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