antedating of y'all (1702)

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Should be easily findable."

JL


On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 8:09 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> We sometimes said "you all" even in NYC when we meant "all of you"; but
> not habitually and absolutely *not* when we meant "the two of you."
>
> That's the diff between "you all" and "you all."
>
> Of course, white native New Yorkers never said "y'all" under any any
> circumstances, at least not in my hearing.
>
> As I've noted, what we need is not an isolated "you all" or even a "y'all"
> in the 18th C. or earlier. We need one used clearly (and, better yet,
> routinely) in informal address to two people.
>
> Whether Ben's exx. meet that necessary criterion is not clear to me.
>
> With countless thousands of Southern Civil War letters now available,
> surely such "you all"s  should be vast easily findable in large numbers
> from the period 1861-65.
>
> Are there? If not, why not?
>
> JL
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: antedating of y'all (1702)
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 5:21 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>> >
>> > Now if a bunch of conversational "you all"s  were to be found
>> (addressed to
>> > only two rather than a bunch of people) that would be extremely
>> significant.
>> >
>> > (I've searched for 18th century "you all"s, but ECCO isn't quite up to
>> it,
>> > giving thousands of false hits.  "Eighteenth Century Journals, 1685 -
>> > 1835," however, comes up with no positives at all. That's hard to brush
>> > aside.)
>>
>> DARE has Southern-style "you all" from 1816, and Michael Ellis and
>> Michael Montgomery present an 1811 example in their 2011 American
>> Speech paper, "About _All_: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American
>> English I" (AmSp 86(3): 340-354).
>>
>> The 1811 example can also be seen here:
>>
>> http://library.sc.edu/socar/mnscrpts/hutchison.html
>> "But I am not satisfied nor wont be untill I get Back to you all & my
>> native Country."
>> Aug. 6, 1811 (Hutchison Family Papers, Univ. of South Carolina)
>>
>> --bgz
>>
>> --
>> Ben Zimmer
>> http://benzimmer.com/
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> 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."
>



--
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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