Date: Fri, 3 Dec 1993 20:48:11 -0600
From: Daniel S Goodman-1 dsg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MAROON.TC.UMN.EDU
Subject: NYTimes and disappearing Newyawkese
On Fri, 3 Dec 1993, ALICE FABER wrote:
Of course the NY Times uses expressions that aren't stereotypical of current
NY speech. The whole point of most of our objections to the Times article on
NY dialects was that they erroneously treated loss of stereotypical NY
features as equivalent to loss of a distinctly NY dialect.
I realized that -- I just wanted to point out a bit of irony.
My dialect is either Upstate New York or Hudson Valley. To me, New York
City speech sounds odder than the way English-speaking Montrealers talk.
(My mother grew up in NYC and has that accent, but that's not the dialect
I picked up.) Relatively young people from New York City -- and from
Jersey and the Island -- may not have accents as strong as workingclass
and lowerclass New Yorkers who grew up before WWII -- but they still don't
sound exactly accentless to me.
Dan Goodman dsg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]maroon.tc.umn.edu
"Deealict? We don't ain't got no deealict, maister!"