For those of us here who "talk" kinda funny!

Hey Shoe;
I reckon yer just a mite cornfused 'bout how many syllables yer puttin into the vernacular of the Kaintuck oft used word "y'alve" which is actually the combined spelling of "y'all" and "have" pronounced as one syllable only.
Although there is no certainty of the etymological value of "y'alve", Southern linguistic experts are aware of it’s widespread usage.

From "The American Heritage" dictionary we read the following regional note under the definition of “you-all”:

The single most famous feature of southern United States dialects is the pronoun,"you-all", probably heard more often in it’s variant "y’all". You and you-all preserve
the singular/plural distinction that English used to have in thou/you.

Huh?

It's ok NoH2O, you just have to excuse him, and "Shoe will be along any minute now to further confuse us northern folk. And I live in Southwestern NY!

Y'all can even hear it at the Merriam-Webster site: http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?y%27all

Main Entry: you-all
Pronunciation: yü-'ol, 'yü-"; 'yol
Function: pronoun
Date: 1824
Chiefly Southern : YOU -- usually used in addressing two or more persons or sometimes one person as representing also another or others.


Edited to change You to Y'all ;)

This message was edited Friday, Aug 8th 5:37 PM

GW, I didn't hear nothin' when I went to that site!! Seriously though, does this (or any other site) actually pronounce the word? How do I get it to do that? There are so many words that I would like to hear the correct pronunciation of and trying to figure it out by reading the pronunciation just doesn't do the trick for me.

NEVER MIND! I figured it out! I think I will spend the rest of the night listening to it pronounce words. LOL

This message was edited Friday, Aug 8th 7:04 PM

huh?

Sounds simular to ebonics, the way African-Americans talk nowadays. However the culture relates to the people in it. Just a regional or culture thing. There were words and phrases that my family used from the 'old country', Slovakia and Poland that the modern Americans found to be odd. Like you's. Meaning you people, or you guys. It's what they find comfortable. I think the way MavieRose and MiniShnuz articulate to be quaint and unique to their culture and location.

celia; DW's family is from the old country so I understand what you're sayin.

It should be a true southerner doing the sound on the word You all...Just don't sound proper with that mans accent..LOL
Larkie

Larkie; you mean the sound up on the dictionary site, right?

hehe!!!


I sure would like to be there when Shoe and tcfromky meet!!!! LOL

sue

ruby42; I'm goin incognito! I heard he can beat me up! :~o
(do ya think I'll be recognizable as an old tire?)

yes TC...On the site..Sounds funny when he say's You-All..LOL
Larkie

Celia, I was going to mention "youse" but you beat me to it. I had neighbors who said that, and also "ret the table".

I think MiniSchnuz and RedRose might also have some different speech patterns because of their being all or partially deaf. When you can't hear the spoken word, or the range is significantly limited, it results in a different interpretation. One of my cousins was deaf but learned to speak by touching his mother's lips and watching closely as she spoke, and then by her patient tutoring when he learned to read. Later, he lost most of his sight, so learning new words was virtually impossible for him. But he did continue to pronounce the ones he knew in his own special way.

The spoken language fascinates me, and a unique accent is like a magnet. But my granddarling just says, "you talk funny." So not everyone shares this fascination.

Aimee, didn't know that about Mini and Mavie. Thanx for letting me know.

Larkie; guess I'll havta maybe show up at the KYRU as a tree or sumpin then!

Aimee; very poignant post.

Celia, it's Mini and RedRose! MaVie is from the Philippines and sometimes words things differently, as do many people for whom English is a second language, of course. Mini is deaf, and as I understand it, RedRose has some hearing loss. Of course, it's more interesting to say they are from South Louisiana, but then there is Lisa from there and she writes like an English teacher.

Oh wow, I guess I need to think before I type! Thanx for clearing things up!

some people here also say yous as in plural of you.

We also drop the 't's and 'w' from the widdle of words eg
water becomes wa'er,
butter becomes bu'er,
matter becomes ma'er
power becomes par
flower becomes flar

the words are said as if we are gonna say the word itself but drop the middle letters

tc, on your original post, you said the contraction for you all have ("y'all've) was the original word in question.

I say it in 2 syllables, like yol-live (sort of like saying ya then olive). Often used here among us with early associations with West Virginia. I haven't heard it said the way you typed it.

Y'all've got me so anxious to meet y'all next month :D
Especially the 'Shoe!

Off the subject,but is there a meeting or sumpin' going on next month or is it just personal meet-ups??? Thanks, SB

lupy; I'll be thrilled to meet ol 'shoe myself! He's 'bout the only other'n (besides Felder and myself) I've ever saw that types with a southern accent!
And I 'spect I'll not hold it agin ya fer sayin "y'allve" as a two syllable word. ;~)

By the way, when I drive south on I-71 on my way home, I usually stop at that White Castle there just off the Grove City exit. Are ya near there?

Scooterbug, go to the Preferences sidebar and subscribe to the Roundup forum. There's LOTS of get-togethers held around the country! We like each other so much, we want to see each other face-to-face. :) There's a roundup in Cadiz, KY the last weekend in September; that's the one some are referring to here. See http://davesgarden.com/f/roundup/

gw wish I could come.
tc,we talk funny? I always,thought it was all the other folks that talk funny :)

This message was edited Saturday, Aug 9th 3:10 PM

Celia... yes i am originally from the Philippines. i do have an accent when i speak but very understandable compared to others i am having difficulty listening to.

i used Y'All cause that is easier and shorter to type. years ago, when i was in school, i tutored a lot of students from the south. so the twang and dialect sort of stuck with me LOL!

when we used to lived in the Philippines, my father worked in the American Consulate. i also had an opportunity to deal with lots of folks from the southern part of the US. i can talk funny when i feel like being silly. my friends used to enjoy listening to my imitation of their native tongue :).

My kids' favorite when we were in TN was everyone asking up if we wanted "Swait Tay" lol. I think that Sonic uses tea flavored hummingbird nectar. (Can you tell I drink unsweartened tea? My Mom from West Virginia on the other hand did NOT.)

cc; yer right, it is all the others that have the accent! Shoulda thought a that before now, how does one change the name of the topic to a thread? ;~)

MavieRose; my DW's brother has an accent all his own, it's Western Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Texas! You orta hear him spout!

frog; the first time I took DW to Kaintuck to meet my folks, we stopped at this little roadside store. I fergit now what DW bought, but the checker asked her if she wanted her stuff "in a lil sayyack" (translation: "little sack").
Of course I understood the checker's vernacular, but after we got in the car DW asked me "Do they make one of those English translation books for those of us who are not from Kentucky?"

TC... nothing new to me. i think i've heard 'em all LOL!!! now it is a matter of trying to decipher what was said, cuz some of those twangs are all new to me. hahahahahaha!

now u brought up another issue, English like from England or Europe is difficult for me to hear and digest.

Hey Shoe! where are yah!!!

Now, you see, I can sympathise with your DW! My daughter married a southwestern Kentucky boy, and we shore are havin' fun with that ax'ent of his'n. Fortunately, he knows it because we love him that we pick on him!

TC...if she had've bought it in WV they would have put it in a "poke" for her. Jo

I've had the pleasure of working in jobs which afforded me the opportunity to speak to people from all over the country. One was at a university, and the women in my office were often the prospective students' first contact with the school. It was fun talking to the kids and their parents. The other job was with a large catalog company's call center doing customer service and customer service support (call backs on problems escalated to supervisors). We had a huge customer base in the east coast for one of the catalogs, so I spoke with many folks from New York and New Jersey. The sweet tones of southerners were always welcome after hearing the rapid-fire, nasal twang of the east coasters (no offense y'all - it was probably just the customers, many of them busy business people in NY).

My DD in Pa. is so proud to say she is an East Coast Girl, and has really shed her Southern speech. But I preferred it the old way. She sounds so much more brittle and distant and aloof now. It's a clipped speech which makes me feel uneasy coming from my offspring. She grew up in Texas.

On the other hand, I have a DD in Tn. who couldn't sound more drawly if she tried. She basically grew up in South Louisiana. Her "R" gets lost before her words get out. My Mississippi-bred relatives sound a lot more like her than do the rest of us.

Somewhere in between, the rest of the crew sounds more alike. Are we a melting pot?

Now see, you've got "east" all mixed up with that city thing. Out here, we say crick instead of creek and "I vum!" when startled out of our complacency and "Hark Now!" when the children get too rambunctious and "Oh, FIDDLESTICKS" when life just gets away from us. And then there's, "O for pity's sake," when the new shoes you bought the kid two weeks ago don't fit anymore. We do broaden out our vowels a bit and there's a tendency to drop gs and dangle participles, and my Dad has injected a bit of north Joisy into our vocabulary - figger for figure and batata for potato, but it's allrelative (hehehe).

This is what makes language so doggoned fun! Yeah, the folks who called us were generally city folk with addresses right smack in the middle of NYC. There and Chicago, come to think of it. And the accents sounded similar, ironically.

And I can't believe I've been mis-spelling y'all, ya'll, y'all!
Naw, still like it spelt wrong, sounds funny the other way (o;

Well, Vi, it sure beats "you'uns!" I just can't feel right about that one.

So funny to see this thread, just last week I got a lesson on y'all southern speaking from Cala.

http://davesgarden.com/t/392379/

I talk to my southern Daver friends on the phone and I have such a hard time understanding them at all! I am amazed at how thick their accents are. I have never been around southern folk so it was a big shock.

LOL GW, of "hearing the rapid-fire, nasal twang of the east coasters" I wonder if that is what they are saying about me! I was raised in Boston and then NJ and moved to California as a young adult so my accent is a confused mix.

Way back when I adopted Texas, I was amused by some of the menfolk who said things like "horsefeathers" when exasperated. To go out on a job site and hear the down-home sayings in a Tex-Mex accent was wild. Then I went to Port Arthur and Corpus Christi, and it was all tangled up with Cajun, Tex-Mex and a little bit of what I think was Canadian French. Who knows, it could have been Greek for all I understood. Looking back, I think the crew was doing one of those lumber stretcher things on the new lady from La.

When we visited Lisa and family last fall, we had a tough time understanding each other sometimes. Lisa would say, "Okay, y'all, all I just heard was darndt, darndt, darndt!" That got to be the joke with us. Pronounce darnet as a nasal twang and you'll get the idea. ;)

all; watch the movie "Slingblade" and you'll hear exactly how my grandaddy sounded. The main character in this movie is Billy Bob Thornton and in the movie the main character talks just like my grandad did. Not sure where Billy Bob is from but down in central KY a lot of folks have two first names.
For example, the followin list of names is actually some good friends of mine livin down there and they are addressed as;

Billie-Jo
Reva-Nell
Joe-Pete
Betty-Sue
Margaret-Ann
Gin-Linny
Sara-Jane

I could list lots more but y'all get the picture.

Aimee mentioned melting pot and I know we've all heard that here in America there's a mix of folks from around the world all dumped in that pot together.

That's kinda neat if ya ask me!




This message was edited Sunday, Aug 10th 8:01 PM