youse as singular; also antedating OED (1893-)

[Joel S. Berson]

Have you looked in Google Books?

A.  Youse:  I find "youse is" before 1910 on the first page of (251)
results in 1896 (a journal, but the date is plausible, since vol. 14
is 1901) and many books in the 1900s.  And there are earlier:

(1)  1887, Puck (New York), p. 192/2 -- "T'roth, Rosie Deasey, youse
is th' (hic-gl) foinest gurrul in th' War-r-d to be callin' on a
could night!"  [caption]

(2)  1888, "Andersonville violets: a story of northern and southern
life", Herbert W. Collingwood, p. 59 -- ""Ef youse is man 'nuff ter
kill dat dorg, you is all right, I reckon."  [Harvard catalog has an
1889 edition.]


B.  Yous:  There are also 112 instances of "yous is" before 1910.

(1)  One from 1854.  "Easy Nat; or, the Three Apprentices. A Tale of
Life in New York and Boston, but 'Adapted to any Meridien'", by A. L.
Stimson, page 267 --

"Yous is not the nice lady that blisse joutleman was to marry ?"
cried the woman ... "No, I was with Nathan Mudge.  My name was Kate Godwin."

This has 14 more pages with "yous" without the "is"; probably all for
a singular referent.

(2)  Another, from 1835 or 1836, is a plural -- "how do I know that
either of yous is Mr. Stinton".  The Dublin Penny Journal, 1835-6, p. 200/1-2.

These (A. and B.) antedate OED2 "yous, pron.", 1893--.


C.  Yehs:  Many (about 911) before 1899, but so many false positives
that I didn't go past the first 20 results.


P.S.  The two earliest quotations for "yous" in the OED in fact are
from S. Crane, 1893.

Joel

At 2/20/2012 05:18 PM, Michael Newman wrote:
>I sent this query out earlier but no one seems to have bitten. In
>case that was because I included it as an afterthought to another
>topic, and not lack of interest, I'd like to try again. A literary
>scholar  called Allen Slotkin claims that Stephen Crane was very
>adept at representing dialect. HIs particular point is on this 1893
>novel of Crane's called Maggie, Girl of the Streets, in which the
>characters use you, yeh (obviously a reduction of you) and yehs,
>pretty much in what would be classic sociolinguistic variation if it
>were real. This means that yehs gets used sometimes as a singular. I
>doubt that this is in fact an accurate description of 1893 NYCE,
>although I'm aware of y'all getting used as a singular in places.
>
>Any one have any evidence one way or the other (admitting the
>difficulty of proven the non-existence of a form)?
>
>
>Michael Newman
>Associate Professor of Linguistics
>Queens College/CUNY
>michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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