Chipping away at -er comparatives?

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Mar 10, 2014, at 10:44 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 12:02 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wro=
> te:
>
>> but watch out for those Mo' Better Blues=E2=80=A6
>
>
> Why didn't he use the spelling, "Mo' Bettuh Blues," dammit?! Nobody would
> say [mo bEdr], unless he was a boojie who became aware, too late, that a
> white person was within earshot.
>
> Some black speakers use the pronunciation [mo.Is] for _most_. I've never
> been able to figure out whether this is 1) a reanalysis of "most" as
> "more+est" with the ordinary application of intervocalic r-drop or 2) the
> reanalysis of "more" as "mo," with the ordinary addition of -est.
>
> My vote is for (2). Back in StL, "Forest [Park]" alternated freely between
> "Fahriss" and "Faw.iss." I've never heard "mor.iss," only "mow.iss."
> --=20
> -Wilson

mo betta [mo beta] and mo worse [mo wrs] are present in Hawaiian Pidgin (HCE), and are listed in "Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole Language of Hawai'i" by Sakoda and Siegel.

Whether related or not, yori betaa (more better) and ichiban beusuto (number one best) exist in Japanese, too.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

Learn Ainu! https://sites.google.com/site/aynuitak1/videos

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