From: Rick McCallister
Message: 63310
Date: 2009-02-21
> From: Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...>Most of them had at least 300 years --more if you take into account settlement patterns. How does that compare to other dialects?
> Subject: [tied] Re: My version
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Saturday, February 21, 2009, 6:20 AM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...>
> wrote:
>
> > At 7:43:34 PM on Friday, February 20, 2009, Francesco
> Brighenti
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > I realize that my views on what 'true'
> dialects have
> > > represented throughout the medieval (and part of
> modern)
> > > history of Europe cannot be applied to what some
> of the
> > > members of the List want to call 'American
> dialects'. By
> > > now, it should be clear to anyone that to me
> those are not
> > > 'dialects' at all, but rather 'accent
> varieties'.
> >
> > It isn't just phonology, you know. To quote Raven
> I.
> > McDavid, Jr., in 'Dialect Differences and Social
> Differences
> > in an Urban Society':
> >
> > "A dialect, in the sense in which American
> scholars use it,
> > is simply an habitual variety of a language, set off
> from
> > other such varieties by a complex of features of
> > pronunciation (/drin/ vs. /dren/ "drain"),
> grammar
> > (_I_dove_ vs. _I_dived_) or vocabulary (_doughnut_ vs.
> > _fried_cake_).
> >
> > DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English) is
> largely a
> > compendium of lexical variation. Grammatical variation
> is
> > for the most part much smaller, but it certainly
> exists,
> > even ignoring AAVE: as an example, I live on the edge
> of a
> > region in which 'The car needs washed' is
> grammatical.
> > I'm not arguing that differences amongst U.S.
> varieties are
> > comparable to those amongst Italian varieties, but I
> do
> > think that you may be underestimating them.
>
> In order to reach some more solid conclusions as to whether
> or not
> the varieties of European-American English you refer to can
> be
> termed as 'dialects' by full right, I think it
> would be necessary to
> quantify the amount of grammatical divergence from standard
> American
> English in each of them, grammatical divergence being, in
> my
> opinion, the decisive factor in assigning a variety of
> spoken
> English the dialect status. If differences of accent and/or
>
> vocabulary largely prevail over grammatical differences, I
> wouldn't
> call those varieties of European-American English
> 'true' dialects.
> See again Chambers and Trudgill's definitions and
> discussion in
> paras 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 of their book _Dialectology_,
> available in
> (limited) preview at
>
> http://tinyurl.com/bu24hs
>
> > > And, in addition to that, their formation is so
> > > 'ridiculously' RECENT!
> >
> > Must have been true of every dialect at some point.
>
> The problem with all American varieties of English is that
> they are
> soon doomed to death due to the rapid and inexorable
> diffusion of a
> de-individualized standard form of American English
> vectored all
> over the country by the all-conditioning television, movie
> industry,
> press etc. They are already converging toward a far more
> unified
> speech model, and will probably be demised all over the
> U.S. in the
> course of the present century. This problem affects all the
>
> countries of the Western world, but the history of the
> European-
> American varieties of English (some of which may have been
> incipient 'dialects' at some point in time in the
> pre-mass media
> epoch) is so short-termed, that by the end of their
> linguistic
> history they won't have succeeded in acquiring all the
> features of
> a 'true' dialect simply due to 'lack of
> time'!
>
> Best,
> Francesco