thee, thou, thy and thine
After I'd studied "y'all" for a while I turned my attention to thee, thou, thy and thine. Most people have at least a basic background on them. They used to be informal ways of addressing people, used for friends and equals, similar to German "du" and Spanish "tu". Then Quakers mucked everything up by calling everyone by thee, thou, etc. and refusing to grant preferred status to the higher-ups, like tax collectors and royalty. THEN to avoid sounding like Quakers, English speaking society decided to just call
everyone you etc., without regard to status. So what happened to thee, thou, thy and thine? Several things. First, they went out of common use; they were common in certain Quaker areas and Quaker communities for a while, and in some British dialects, such as Yorkshire and near Lancashire, but they have begun to fade, even there, recently.
Now this story gets interesting in several ways. First is, what little usage they have today, could basically be called "put-on religious" or "put-on Quaker." If you want to sound old, or hopelessly out of date, or rigid or moralistic in the sense that people see old Quakers, you might want to use them. People generally have lost track of the grammatical difference between "thee" and "thou" so they might use "thee" in subject position, or less frequently, "thou" in object position, incorrectly. They don't have a very clear sense of their grammatical sense, except possibly in the places where they were really used daily.
Then, I asked the Quakers what they thought of so-called "plain speaking"...how could it be that, if it's called plain speaking, it's really only used in a "put on" way? Quakers are by nature opposed to pretentiousness, thus they shun such things as creating an in-group, putting on airs of any kind, or trying to "sound" as if they were something they're not. So, are these words doomed? Yes, in the Quaker community anyway. If they sound put-on, Quakers aren't going to use them. Period.
Such it is that the opposite has evolved from what was, at one time, "plain speaking." If it is no longer plain, it is on its way out, and if any group
chooses to start using it on a day-to-day basis, to create an ingroup, religious or not, or for any other reason, I'd like to know. It's a system, and, without wanting exactly to go back to the days of King James, I really would like to know how it sounds in an everyday kind of way.
Labels: dialects, grammar, y'all
annals of y'all, continued
There is no question that we northerners hear singular "y'all" often down here in West Texas. A couple of examples will help. First, and this one is common: I'm standing alone at the schoolhouse entrance waiting for my children and a school official says to me, "How are y'all?" The answer is clear:
We're fine, because she was clearly referring to me and mine, all of us, even though only I was present. OK, I have no problem with that. Second, I'm in a restaurant with a 7-year-old, and the waitress says, "Do y'all want some coffee," and I say
yes, I do in order to emphasize that it's just me that wants the coffee, no thanks for the seven-year-old. I'm ok with this too: I'm still a stranger, she doesn't know if I have family, she'd rather assume lots of possibilities than assume I'm alone in this world. But the second time around, she says "Do y'all want cream with that?" and now, I feel like I've already
told her I'm alone, she
knows the seven-year-old doesn't want cream, etc.
In the lab yesterday morning I found the quote where there's nothing more likely to start another Civil War than a notherner telling a southerner that they use y'all singular. When I found that I pressed "print" and should have known that 37 pages would print out before it was over. The passage was interesting though, not least for its comments, in which people weighed in on other you plurals (my favorite "you'ns" as well as "youse") and their distributions. But it gave several interesting reasons worth chewing over that we hear so much of this. One is that since "y'all" is a mark of southerness, a northerner is more likely to hear it in
any context as if to say, I'm southern, and we're in the south, and this is how we reach out to you. Another is that it's a mark of familiarity; one of its functions is to reach out and be friendly and polite; in that context it could be said that politeness and hospitality are clearly more pressing than details like singular/plural (this alone being a concept somewhat alien to northerners). So, it's not that y'all is singular, it's not, it's more that politeness trumps grammatical accuracy in some or many circumstances.
A fair swath of my class, maybe a third of about thirty people, said they only use "y'all" to
mean plural. The article bears out that educated southerners generally say this, believe it, and for all we know follow it (one point made was that they argue passionately about it, generally opposed to the possibility of singular y'all, yet the facts don't bear them out; apparently there are
plenty of people using singular y'all, for whatever reason, and these are very likely the same people). I have not heard
these particular students use singular y'all, in opposition to their expressly stated rule, though I've challenged them to listen carefully. I have found some who admit to using it freely singular
and plural, who interpreted it as singular/polite and used it for everybody, and some who aren't really sure.
Surprisingly, wait staff is a definite subculture for everyone. Waitresses and waiters have their own rules, because they deal with hundreds of people, have to be polite, and don't have time to worry about details of customers' personal lives. They talk about the "rhythm of working" and admit to using "y'all" much the same way as the waitress used it with me.
The author of the article pointed out other more serious problems with finding and tracking singular y'all, though: half the time we (even linguists who care passionately) don't really keep track of what we really say, and, the other half, we are in the role of hearer, or receiver, and don't really know what the speaker
meant; presumably, even if we could ask, they might not know whether they were primarily motivated by grammatical accuracy, politeness, intimacy, southern pride, or whatever. I suspect, and this is the bottom line, really, that this is a case of rules that are in opposition: one says y'all is plural, the other says, when in doubt, be polite, and allow for other unseen people in the picture where you might not be familiar with them (the unseen spouse, for example). When asked about the rule (y'all is plural), there's no question: y'all is plural. If asked in another way, the answer might be different.
I have to relate a good story; four rough northern men are in a North Carolina diner. The waitress says to one, "Y'all want cream in your coffee?" to which he says, "how do I know if you mean just me, or all of us, since you said 'y'all'?" To which she replies, "If I'd a meant 'all-of-y'all, I would have said 'all-of-y'all'. Now, do y'all want cream or not?"
Back to our point: if y'all were so clearly plural, what would the point be of even
having all-of-y'all?
On the national scene, I'd like to point out that
you guys of my home dialect is doomed, a victim of literalism that no longer allows referring to any mixed group of males/females with a male pronoun of any kind.
Youse and
you'ns are clearly marked as "hick" (or "working-class" which is a kind of bizarre euphemism for "lower class" or as my student called it, "white trash". She was intimating that it wasn't the geographical association of "youse" that bothered her so much though as a waitress herself she didn't really care that much for Jersey manners or food snobbery. She was saying, she wouldn't or couldn't use "youse" because of that class marking alone, but, to her relief, living here offered her the opportunity to use "y'all" which can be done much more freely among all classes and at all levels of society. Sure, we know it's not formal English. But, our phones seem to know we are in Texas, and, if we leave out the apostrophe, my phone at least will supply it, and even put it in the right place.
Liberman, M. (2009).
Singular y'all: a "devious Yankee rumor"? Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009. Available 10-12.
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
singular y'all
My class and I go back and forth a little about language; they're pretty much all from Texas, although I have one from Australia, and another from Italy, and a third from Albany NY which thank God lends me some credibility about Northernisms like "you guys." I ask them honestly what they mean by certain things and they usually tell me their true feelings.
So I said to them, I'm trying to figure out "y'all," and I really want to know how you feel and how you use it. I had introduced the topic once earlier when I said that when I typed "yall" into my phone my phone actually
added the apostrophe as if it was a standard word and everyone should know how to spell it right.
But today I had read something by Mencken, of all people, who said something to the effect that out of 100 times you might hear it to refer to someone who is alone (it's common, for example, for people to say, 'how are y'all?' to people who are alone), it can be interpreted as a polite, you and yours, as in, 'how are you and yours?' (now this interpretation is very much in fitting with our Latin, Spanish/French roots where referring to you in the plural is always more polite than referring to you in the singular). But the 100th time, Mencken says, it's just plain singular, no two ways about it. There's no possible "you and yours" interpretation that could go with it. So I said to my class, what's up with that? Can it really be truly singular? I'm well aware of "all of y'all" which is a definitive plural, emphasizes the inclusiveness of a group. And locals are quick to point out that, although y'all easily moves from singular to plural (same way 'you' does), all-a-y'all is
always plural.
No, says one, a student who I trust to think carefully and give a good answer. It's used in the singular, but it's polite, and it refers to the plural; its
meaning is plural.
So it occurred to me that one reason to account for the other 1%, is that some people
interpret the singular y'all is simply something you use for everyone, as a gesture of politeness; it's marked as polite, but not necessarily marked as plural. So there are a number of people around who go around calling everyone "y'all," not realizing that someone who didn't have a family might actually get offended.
And sure enough one woman said, after class, that she was a waitress, and was in the habit of calling everyone "y'all," when one day someone got offended; that person was overweight, and clearly alone in the world, or at least in the booth. And that customer assumed that "y'all" was a reference to his/her obesity, since there wasn't any other plural around.
Students were interested in what I had to say about "you'ns," "youse" and "you lot," other you plurals that are out there. In fact I have read a bit about them, but when it came to "y'all," I never quite understood the singular/plural controversy. Now, I'm surrounded by it (that, and "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" which I've reinterpreted as "polite"). I always tend toward polite and non-confrontational, as I explained to my students, so it's only a matter of time before I start in with some of this "y'all" and "all-a-y'all" as long as I can feel like I've figured it out well enough. We talked about other language changes: Ms., everyone and "their" book, etc. Some of my serious thinking about language and language change I'll put
here as I'm trying to corral my thinking about linguistics in general and put it in one place. But, at the same time, I'm learning another language. Fixin' to learn it, anyway!
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
pittsburghese
Peterson, R. (2011, Feb. 13).
Is yunz is or is yinz ain't from Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11044/1124805-109.stm. Accessed 2-11.
Both some old friends of mine, and my brother, sent me this article, which ironically was written by a guy here in Carbondale; surely, if he's from Pittsburgh, and he's been here in town so long, I must know him. It's well-known that I have strong feelings about this dialect and would be interested in any article about it, and I am also interested in the pursuit of pronouns like "yunz" (or "yins" or "you'ns" as the case may be) just as a matter of principle.
The article brings up a number of points, not all of which I entirely agree with. One is the suggestion that routine shortening of expressions is a Pittsburgh-dialect thing: a lot of this shortening, I would say, is quite common everywhere. Who doesn't use "wanna" or shorten "ing" words to "in" words (going to -> goin' to, snowing -> snowin', losing -> losin')? The first step, it seems to me, is to separate out what is truly Pittsburghese from what is just general laziness of the mouth which we are all guilty of.
Now an argument is to be made that Pittsburghers will shorten some things in some ways that are not common to other areas or other people; ok, I accept that. So, maybe "slippery -> slipp'y" is common to the Pittsburgh dialect but not to others (one example of this would be that Iowans often would say "probably -> pro'ly" in such a way that I always thought was uniquely Iowan). It would make sense that certain shortened forms would be commonly enough heard to be just taken, after a while, as part of the local dialect. And, that they wouldn't be shortened that way in other places. One common example of this is in cases where certain towns or cities put a word in the language much more often in one area than in another (so that, when there is a town of Slippery Rock, people have many more occasions to use the word, and so are more likely to shorten it). We here in southern Illinois have some unusual town names and can attest to this.
I agree with him that the correct pronunciation of "yunz" is closer to "yunz" than "yinz" but a better way of saying this would be that it's the vowels that make Pittsburghese a thoroughly unique dialect, and the vowels are almost impossible to do justice to in English orthographic script. "Yunz" is in fact the most salient of Pittsburghese words, so it's good to hear that people are using it again, and calling themselves "yunzers," etc. although there is a measure of pretentiousness in that. Pittsburgh is the only large city in a large mountain area (that includes smaller cities like Knoxville, Charlestown WV, maybe Roanoke VA & a few others) but it's a fairly extensive area with a truly unique accent. An old story from Kentucky holds that a man is in a doctor's office, stalled temporarily holding a jar with his wife's urine; when asked if it is urine, he says, "no, it's ma wife's"...this story points out that such pronouns as "his'n", her'n", your'n", our'n" and even "their'n" were all possible if not common in the mountains for quite some time (I'm not sure of this, but would like to know more); ironically the only true survivor is "thine". I'd also like to know to what extent these pronouns could be plural (the writer says, one could hear "yunzes"; it reminds me a little of the arguments around "y'all", "all-of-y'all", etc.)
The one assertion that fascinates me is the idea that a dialect, in this case Pittsburghese, could have more shortening, or be more clipped, merely because so many of its speakers work hard labor in the hot mills day in and day out. OK, here's the question: to what extent does one's environment really affect one's speaking patterns? I will buy the general idea that people in the south, say, speak more slowly than people on the east coast, possibly because of the long, hot, sultry summers make the general pace of life slower. Maybe I'll buy it. But some southern vowels are
shorter (I -> ah) than their northern counterparts. Iowans shorten some things that Pittsburghers don't. Wouldn't these changes run throughout the dialect? In other words, if southerners had uniformly slower speech/more drawn-out vowels
due to their environment, wouldn't that show up in
all the vowels? Just askin'.
So, in conclusion, I don't really have a complaint with Dr. Peterson's article, except that he may have attributed some things to Pittsburghese that really are better characterized as routine, conversational, everyone-ese. I was disappointed that there was no mention of "gum bands," (known in the rest of the world as "rubber bands", which to me always represented the essence of the dialect; to this day, I insist, to my kids' bemusement, that there is no such thing as "rubber bands." But to me, way out in the hinterlands as I am, there is no hanging on to the curious vowels; I can no longer replicate those accurately, even when I want to. I'll stick my neck out here and say, these vowels are highly unique and unusual; they are common to a whole mountain region and therefore not attributable to a work-in-the-mills environment; and, that in general, most dialectal variation is just the way things are (what people, in groups, choose to do together) rather than attributable to specific environmental conditions. There is nothing specifically steel-mill about "Souseside" dialect, though hearing it sure brings associations with it, so you can practically feel the slag, under your feet, when people use it.
Labels: dialects
