From: Rick McCallister
Message: 63494
Date: 2009-02-27
> From: Andrew Jarrette <anjarrette@...>I remember reading somewhere that during Dutch rule, only about 25% of NYC spoke Dutch. Most spoke English, others spoke French (Hueguenot), Portuguese (Jews), etc. The Dutch seem to have had a knack for losing their language in their colonies --to English, Papiamento in the Caribbean, to Afrikaans in South Africa, etc
> Subject: [tied] Re: American Dutch dialects
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Friday, February 27, 2009, 6:13 PM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen"
> <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> >
> >
> > > 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
> >
>
>
> From my point of view, because I think the colonists who
> originated
> from Britain would regard the Dutch settlers as foreigners,
> and
> therefore would not be prone to imitating their styles of
> pronunciation, particularly since most of them wouldn't
> be able to
> speak English anyway. Also weren't the Dutch at this
> time a minority?
> I think minority languages seldom have much influence on
> majority
> languages, especially not on their pronunciation. I know
> Québec
> French has absolutely no influence on the English spoken
> west, east,
> south, or north (Nunavut) of it, and probably never has.
>
> If you're saying that the Dutch partly assimilated and
> adopted English
> as their language but pronounced it with their retroflex
> r's, and this
> style of English spread throughout the U.S., I would doubt
> it because
> I know that foreigners who come to Canada almost all
> eventually come
> to speak Canadian-accented English (e.g. in their
> children's speech),
> rather than Canadians adopting uvular or trilled /r/ for
> example.
>
> If you're saying that the Dutch were not so much a
> minority and their
> numbers could have had this much influence on American
> English, well,
> I would ask why aren't Americans speaking Dutch today,
> or why aren't
> there larger enclaves of Dutch today, since the numbers
> required to
> have this much influence would surely leave greater remains
> today? I
> think that to truly cause Americans to start pronouncing
> English /r/'s
> according to the Dutch method, the Dutch would have had to
> become the
> teachers of American settlers. And in that case
> wouldn't they have
> taught Dutch rather than English?
>
> I remember you once said that the Danish uvular /r/ is due
> to French
> influence. I would ask, is the fact that /w/ became /v/ in
> Danish
> also due to French influence? Or could Danish and French
> have
> developed them independently, and if so why not uvular /r/?
>
> Similarly, why couldn't American English have developed
> retroflex (and
> bunched) /r/ independently, from the original English
> speakers, and
> not due to foreign influence?
>
> Andrew