Re: My version

From: Rick McCallister
Message: 63310
Date: 2009-02-21

--- On Sat, 2/21/09, Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...> wrote:

> From: Francesco Brighenti <frabrig@...>
> 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

Most of them had at least 300 years --more if you take into account settlement patterns. How does that compare to other dialects?
An interesting relic of former dialects are surnames, especially British lastnames, in parts of the US. Mc Carricker > Calico, Kennedy > Cannaday, Canada stand out in my memory but in the area where WV, VA, KY, TN & NC (almost) come together, there are some odd ones. Melungeon genealogists sometimes come with some howlers in terms of the origins of these names --claiming they're from Turkish, but they are mainly Scots-Irish