| From: | David Peterson <digitalscream@...> |
|---|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, June 27, 2001, 7:45 |
In a message dated 6/26/01 3:00:16 PM, romilly@EGL.NET writes:
<< We get them in English in a few odd dialects/idiolects, or sometimes when
the sentence is long and the syntax gets a little tangled up:
"The shirt, which you're wearing it, is green"; "the island, which there's
a tree on it, is over there"; "the man, which I gave him the money, wasted
it on lottery tickets".>>
You know, I just thought of this, but I was brought up using these. The
English examples you give are ones that (at least in literature by Roth and
Malamud and such) native speakers of Yiddish use when speaking English: "The
sandwich, like poison it tastes!"
Anyway, my original step-father came from an Armenian family [and before
I get further in, I know nothing about Armenian, except the word for
grandson, "tsakas" (that's me), and grandma, "goker" (that's my step-dad's
mom)], and he and his family always begin sentences like: "My brother, he's
working at the store," or "My sister Dolly, she's such a dingbat" (a common
one), "Your mother, she's always so uptight". It seems like they have to
have the sentence with a pronoun as the subject, or something, and to specify
it, they throw a name out in the beginning or some sort of noun phrase as a
topic marker (?). Anyway, I didn't even realize that I spoke this way until
a few years ago, and didn't even realize that it wasn't that common until a
few months ago.
-David