Re: American Dutch dialects

--- On Fri, 2/27/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: American Dutch dialects
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Friday, February 27, 2009, 12:01 PM
> > AFAIK Southwestern England today has retroflex r's
> including
> > syllable-final, and I believe Shropshire does as well.
>
>
> Those sites I've seen present this 'retroflex
> r' in initial position.
> The interesting retroflex r is the syllable-final one which
> produces
> the preceding vowel to be r-colored. Do you have a
> reference on such a
> phoneme on the British.
>
> > There may have
> > been more areas of England that were rhotic in the
> past, from which
> > emigrants could have gone to America.
>
> The r of which then would have to be retroflex and
> r-coloring to make
> your theory stick. We know there is a retroflex, r-coloring
> r in
> Leids, we know the Dutch colonized parts of the American
> East Coast
> which later became very important, and that they must have
> made up the
> most important non-English-speaking element there,
> perfectly situated
> to deliver elements to pull the incipient American language
> away from
> the British they had freed themselves from. What is the
> problem? Why
> would you rather assume influence from a non-documented and
> non-documentable assumed dialect in England than from one
> we know was
> actually there?
>
>
> Torsten

The problem is that Dutch probably died out in NYC around or before 1700. NYC was already majority English speaking under Dutch rule. Dutch only survived out in a few back-water areas.
I don't know how long Dutch survived in Delaware or South Jersey.