Re: American Dutch dialects

--- On Thu, 2/26/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: American Dutch dialects
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Thursday, February 26, 2009, 3:40 PM
> > Perhaps NYC English has a Dutch substrate --e.g.
> "Dem bums don'
> > know nuttin' 'bout dat." "Put da erl
> in da cah." "Flush dem toids
> > in da terlet."
>
> Where do you get that idea from? There is nothing Dutch
> about the
> development /&r/ > /&I/. On the contrary it
> shows later immigrants
> struggling with the Dutch/American retroflex 'r'.

New York English, until very recently did not have final /r/, except in words such as "terlet" and "erl" --watch your reruns of Archie Bunker /a:chiy b@...@/ in "All in the Family"

> The only other languages I know which uses 'them'
> as an article is
> colloquial Swedish:
> 'Them thar' mountains' = 'Dom där
> bergen'

The Swedes were in upper Delaware and the Philly area very early on 1638-54, in Cristiana and Wilmington DE, SW NJ and SE PA well before the British colonized the region c. 1680.
The Dutch were in lower Delaware c. 1640s in present Lewes and Cape Henlopen.

> But Afrikaans has double negative, unlike Dutch, so that
> could be from
> a Dutch creole. On the other hand, double negative is
> common elsewhere
> in English.
>
>
> > But standard US English did not spread from NYC, it
> spread
> > from the Philly area, Lancaster Co. PA and points west
> with the
> > arrival of the Scots-Irish and Germans, the
> Pennsylvania Dutch.
>
> Ellis Island, Pa.?
> Do you have numbers on that?
>
>
> Torsten

Standard US English had already spread out across the country long before Ellis Island was opened in 1892, even before Castle Garden, Manhattan in 1855, Standard US English, i.e. Midwestern, developed in the early 1800s from SE PA English, with some contributions from Appalachian (which also originated in part from Lancaster Co. PA --but with some southern aspects), and also some northern contributions. Midwestern English probably kept close to the standard because of the strong educational system of the German immigrants who dominated the area and learned standard English in school.