Re: American Dutch dialects

--- On Sun, 3/8/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: American Dutch dialects
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, March 8, 2009, 4:49 AM
> > > > They would have studied in the capital BUT
> there were no real
> > > > doctors where my family lived. You had to go
> to the capital by
> > > > car or train.
> > >
> > > He either had direct or indirect constact with
> NYC and
> > > spoke some predecessor of General American, or he
> did
> > > neither. You can't have it both ways.
> > >
> > >
> > > Torsten
> >
> > The problem is that General American English sounds
> nothing like
> > NYC English. I don't think you could persuade
> anyone except a
> > die-hard Yankees fan otherwise.
>
> No, the problem is you think today's NYC English after
> the massive immigration of the late 19th - early 20th
> century is identical to that of the early 19th century.

I imgagine that earlier NYC was even farther removed from General American English. Keep in mind that NYC was NOT the major immigrant port until c. 1830 or so.

>
> > Any contact with NYC English would have been through
> print-media
> > until the 1930s when radio became available for the
> masses and
> > talkies arrived in the cities.
> >
> Any *direct* contact, that is. People here traveled just as
> little as they did in the USA (all passenger trains used to
> have a separate car for the passengers' luggage; when
> people did travel it was with a trunk so massive they
> couldn't handle it themselves) and nonetheless as soon
> as a hierarchy was established in the new and old towns with
> academics from the big city at the top a process started
> which ended with the upper language of the big city becoming
> dominant.
>
>
> Torsten