[Ads-l] NYC English a prefixing.

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

An actual historian of English may want to chime in here, but my understanding is that the a- in what dialectologists and others call a-prefixing derives from the preposition ‘on’. The -ing forms in question were originally gerunds (verbal nouns) not participles and so the a-prefixed form was originally a prepositional phrase. The i- prefix (often y-) that is common in Middle English applied to past participles and was derived from the OE ge- form. The two are not related.

Matt Gordon

From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at GMAIL.COM>
Date: Saturday, August 19, 2023 at 6:05 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: NYC English a prefixing.
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A classic example is "Froggy Went a-Courtin'".  As I understand it, this
*a[-]* prefix is a hold-over from a particle that English used to have in
Middle English and earlier (and which survived later in some rural
dialects) that is cognate with *ge-* in German, though I'm basing that on
something I read 30 years ago. If I recall correctly, at the beginning of
OED's "I" section there are a bunch of recorded (mostly old and dialectal)
words that use *i-* instead of *a-* in the same manner and from the same
etymological source.

On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 10:43 AM Michael Newman <Michael.Newman at qc.cuny.edu>
wrote:

> Another interesting case from our history explorations, this time from a
> Brooklyn diary written by John Baxter (b. 1765). Baxter may or may not be a
> descendant of New Amsterdam's official English translator (later turned
> pirate) George Baxter. John Baxter pretty regularly uses a-prefixing but
> only with verbs related to food gathering:
>
>
>   *   Went a fishing  (1792)
>   *   Went a gunning (1800)
>
> But here's a weird one, I want to ask about:
>
> I went an eeling (1796)
>
> Are there other cases of N insertion before a-prefixes? Has the semantic
> limitation to food gathering activities been noticed before. BTW, there are
> other cases of a-prefixing from other diaries and in Horatio Alger's
> depiction of street kids' speech. The diary is in the archives of the
> Brooklyn Historical Society.
>
>
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