"_every_ since"

[George Thompson]

Back in 2005 I posted a note here that Billie Holiday's lyric "Billie's
Blues" includes the line "I've been your slave every since I've been your
babe".

Several of you -- Wilson, I believe, and another -- responded that this is
common in AAVE, and that I must not listen to my colored friends when they
talk to me.  I slunk away, too abashed to say that I don't much listen to
my white friends, either.

GAT

On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
> > it's hard to believe that none of these writers are white northerners
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> As for the origin of "_every_ since," my intuition/WAG is that it's
> one of those strange hypercorrections that you often get. Here, the
> influencer would be phrases like "every time, every day," in which the
> pronunciation of _every_ usually varies along [EvrI  Evr@ EvI Ev@],
> vs. simple _ever_ [Ev@], among people who know that they don't speak
> "proper English." What's correct is difficult to discover, but
> everybody knows that there are /0/'s that should be /r/'s and /@/'s
> that ought to be /I/'s.
>
> As I've mentioned, I myself was once fully persuaded that _God_ was
> pronounced "guard," after I  discovered the existence of post-vocalic
> /r/, the difference in spelling between "God" and "guard" being of no
> more import than that between, e.g. "mite" and "might." AFAIK, I may
> be the only person in the English-seaking world ever to speak "God" as
> "guard." No one corrected this any more than anyone "in the community"
> corrects, e.g. "jurdge, jedge, murch, mech" instead of "judge, much."
> even though this change is entirely rule-governed and by no means
> random.
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
> to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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