American Language Supplement 2 (34 page)

Thomas is still pursuing his investigation of upstate New York speech,
¹
but meanwhile he has turned aside for a look at that of New York City, and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester and Rockland counties.
²
In this section he has found three different speech-areas – that of the city, including suburban Nassau county, that of the more rural parts of Long Island, and that of Rockland and Westchester, on the two banks of the Hudson above the city. “The historic roots of Suffolk speech,” he says, “are in Connecticut”; that of Rockland and Westchester “shows some traces of upstate speech.” Thomas’s material came from 420 persons, about half of them Cornell undergraduates “who have always lived in the down-state counties,” and whose ancestors, in not a few cases, “have lived there for some generations.” This material excluded, on the one hand, the affectations of the Hudson valley Anglomaniacs, and on the other hand the perversions of the lower classes in New York City. Thomas found the flat
a
prevailing in all situations, least in
aunt, ask, dance, laugh
and
last
, but overwhelmingly in
after, basket, class, grass
and
path
. In
calm
, of course, the broad
a
had it, and the same sound occurred in
gong
and
pond
and
on
, though not in
laundry
, which showed an
o
-sound.
Been
was predominantly
bin
, not
bean
, and
either
was
ee-ther
, not
eye-ther
. On the educated level investigated there was but small evidence, of course, of
deef, crick
and the like. Curiously enough, Thomas concluded that, in its general characters, this downstate speech showed rather more resemblance to Southern American than to either General American or the New England type. “In population, if not in territorial extent,” he said, it “seems worthy of recognition as a fourth main type, especially when we realize that it includes not only the nine counties of this article, but parts of southwestern Connecticut and northern New Jersey as well.”

The vulgar speech of the New York City area, once known as
Boweryese but now generally called Brooklynese, seems to have attracted little attention until after the Civil War. Its chief characteristic today is generally assumed to be its conversion of the
er
-sound into
oi
, but that change apparently did not appear until a relatively late date. When William Cullen Bryant, visiting New York in 1818, made some notes upon the talk he heard, he put down
horl
for
hall, barl
for
barrel, boees
for
boys, sich
for
such
and
yesterday
with the accent on the last syllable, but he did not record
boid
and
thoidy-thoid
.
¹
Nor did either of them or any of their analogues get mention in the introduction to John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States,” first published in 1848, though he noticed and remarked the loans from the Dutch still surviving in New York speech. When the
oi
-sound first appeared, and by whom it was first recorded I do not know, though there is evidence that the New York newspapers were aware of it by 1880, chiefly in the forms of
goil
and
loidy
. But even down to the 90s, when Edward W. Town-send began writing his “Chimmie Fadden” stories, the accepted hallmark of Boweryese was not
boid
or even
goil
, but the substitution of
t
or
d
for the two forms of
th
, as in
wit
or
wid
for
with
, and
dem
for
them
. When, however, E. B. Babbitt, then secretary of the American Dialect Society, published, in 1896, the first study of the New York City dialect from the standpoint of a competent phonologist, the
oi
-sound was duly noted and discussed.
²
Babbitt called it “the one distinctive peculiarity of the New York pronunciation,” and said that it was “only sporadic, and very rare at that, outside the region under consideration,” to wit, New York City, the adjacent parts of New Jersey, “the commutation district” along the Hudson, Long Island, and “the Sound cities of Connecticut, up to Hartford.” It has since been found, as we have seen, in parts of the South,
³
and Babbitt himself noted its use by a Kentucky woman, but it still remains pathognomonic of New York
speech, and later observers have found that it rises therein to relatively high cultural levels.
¹
Said Babbitt:

Brooklynese has since been studied by other philologians and discussed at great length by the newspapers, but a good deal of mystery still hangs about it,
²
and its history remains to be determined. The theory has been advanced that its substitution of
oi
for
er
is a legacy from Dutch times,
³
and may have been suggested by the pronunciation of the Dutch
ui
, as in
duivel
,
⁴
but, as Edwin B. Davis has argued, this notion is brought into doubt by the fact that the actual Dutch
ui
of colonial days has become, not
oi
, but the
i
of
bite
, as in
Spuyten Duyvil
and
Schuyler
.
⁵
Davis is rather inclined to account for
oi
by recalling that the “replacement of a consonant by a semivowel before another consonant in order to obviate some complexity of occlusion or constriction is a common phonetic phenomenon,” but he neglects to explain why this one is not found in
other dialects. Greet, a very competent authority, says that it “may appear … throughout the South,” but he finds that it is “tense and very marked” in the New York dialect, and that it is not reported in any of the dialects of England.
¹
Kenyon and Knott say that it is unknown whether there is any connection between the occurrence of the sound in the South and in New York.
²
It has been suggested that its prevalence in New York may owe something to the influence of Yiddish,
³
but for that surmise there is no real evidence.
⁴
Indeed, there is evidence running the other way in the fact that
oi
seems to have come in before Yiddish began to be the second language of the area.

The compensatory change of
oi
into
er
, as in
erster
for
oyster
and
erl
for
oil
, is equally mysterious. In 1941 Dr. Lou Kennedy, chairman of the faculty committee on speech testing at Brooklyn College, devised a nonsense jingle to illustrate its occurrence, as follows:

In 1926, as I have noted in AL4,
⁵
Henry Alexander, a Canadian phonologist trained in England, suggested that
oi
in
thoid
and
er
in
erster
are really the same sound – that the hearer, expecting
er
in the first place, hears it as
oi
, and expecting
oi
in the second place, hears it as
er
.
⁶
He said:

But this ingenious theory has been attacked by various correspondents – for example, Dr. Roger A. Johnson, professor of mathematics at Brooklyn College.
¹
“Contrary to Alexander,” he writes, “there is nothing half-way about these sounds: they are definitely and clearly interchanged.” He goes on:

A somewhat similar theory was launched by Howard K. Hollister in 1923,
²
and both got some support from Robert J. Menner, of Yale, in 1937.
³
“The New York pronunciation of
bird
with
oi
,” said Menner, “is ridiculed as much as any pronunciation in the country, and in attempting to correct it New Yorkers sometimes lean over backward and pronounce
oil
with the
er
-sound.” But other authorities reject this notion – for example, A. F. Hubbell, of Columbia.
⁴
The diphthong in
thoid
, he says, is actually variable, and sometimes it comes closer to
ui
than to
oi
. “These diphthongs,” he goes on, “do not occur in all the words in which … General
American has
er
. They are heard only in syllables in which the written
r
is followed by one or more consonants which do not constitute an inflectional ending,”
e.g., woik
and
woild
,
¹
but not
stoid
(
stirred
). There is a like difference in the other direction. The change from
oi
to
er
is never made in words which end with the former,
e.g., toy, boy, enjoy
, or in their derivatives, or in those in which
oi
is followed by
al, z
or
t, e.g., loyal, noise
,
²
loiter
, but it does occur in those in which it is followed by
l, n, nt, s, st
and
d, e.g., oil, join, joint, voice, oyster
³
and
avoid
. Hubbell rejects the Menner-Hollister-Johnson theory on the ground that “speakers who use
r
-colored vowels in words like
coil
do so only in these words and not in words like
curl
,” but he confesses that, for the present, he lacks “any satisfactory explanation” of the change.

Various other peculiarities of New York vulgar speech have been noted by other observers,
e.g
., a final
ng
is sometimes changed to
nk
, as in
singink
; an intrusive second
g
appears in a syllable ending with
g
, as in
Long Giland; s
and
sh
are voiced, so that
acid
becomes
azid
and
assure
becomes
azhure
; voiced consonants are unvoiced, so that
village
becomes
villitch
and
hills
becomes
hilce;
a glottal stop is substituted for medial
t
, as in
le’er
(letter);
⁴
the two sounds of
th
are confused, or converted into
t
or
d
, as in
t’row
and
wid;
final
r
often disappears, as in
cah
(car) and
fah
(far); an intrusive
r
is frequent, as in
I sawr;
⁵
the long
i
and the short
u
are converted into
ah
, as in
tahm
(time) and
cahm
(come), and the flat
a
into
e
, as in
kesh
(cash). Even more curious changes have been reported.
Hit
becomes
hitth, dead
is indistinguishable from
debt
, and
trip
acquires an
f
-sound, making it something on the order of
tfip
. Many of these
forms are ascribed to “a common habit of holding the tongue nearly flat in the mouth during the articulation of
t, d, s, z, sh, zh, n
and
r
, instead of placing its tip somewhere upon the gum above the upper teeth.”
¹
It is a strange fact that a man born and bred to this dialect later became one of the most adept practitioners of Oxford English known to linguistic pathology. He was William Joyce, who alarmed the English during World War II in the character of Lord Haw Haw.
²
The Dutch loans in the New York vocabulary, some of them long since taken into the common speech of the country, are discussed in AL4
³
and Supplement I.
⁴