28/08/2001 1:01:23, "Thomas R. Wier" <artabanos@...>
wrote:
>John Cowan wrote:
>
>> Thomas R. Wier scripsit:
>>
>> > As he said, it does indeed arise from external borrowing.
IIRC, the only
>> > known cases of a fricative to stop shift occur in Papua New
Guinea. It is
>> > at any rate an extremely rare type of sound change.
>>
>> It has also happened on de obscure island of Brooklyn. Yiz got
a problem
>> wit dat?
>
>I've read claims that this results from a Dutch substratum there.
This implies
>(a) that that feature of Brooklyn's speech is very old, and (b)
that the Dutch
>were not more or less immediately swamped by anglophone settlers.
I don't
>know of any studies that have investigated either question, but
the latter seems
>to me to be prima facie correct. New York City's official records
were maintained
>in both Dutch and English until about the 1830s, and one famous
member of the
>elite of Dutch descent, Van Buren, eventually became U.S.
President (I seem to
>remember he lived in a Dutch speaking community along the Hudson).
I don't
>know how much of that can be used to make judgements about (a),
however.
The Irish there couldn't have helped either. I can think of quite a
few areas where such a shift happened in pronounciation. Tipperary
is one such example. In fact, the change was particularly prevalent
in Munster.