Re: Saying "Thank you."

Keith Gaughan wrote:

> 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.
But was there a large enough Irish-speaking community there early on
for their dialect to form a substratum of the incoming English speakers?
I know that most of the Irish that immigrated to the United States came
during the 19th century, particularly after the Potato Famine of the 1840s.
That doesn't mean that the New York area couldn't have had a large
community early on; indeed, its traditional status as *the* port of entry for
immigrants stretches back hundreds of years, and peoples from the British
isles were originally including Ireland were always present in some number.
Assuming for the sake of consistency that these people would have been there
since the late seventeenth century, like the Dutch, I just don't know whether
one can point to their presence in sufficient numbers in that place at that
early time.

===================================
Thomas Wier | AIM: trwier

"Aspidi men Saiôn tis agalletai, hên para thamnôi
  entos amômêton kallipon ouk ethelôn;
autos d' exephugon thanatou telos: aspis ekeinê
  erretô; exautês ktêsomai ou kakiô" - Arkhilokhos