Re: Californian vowels [was Re: Liking German]

Quoting Tristan Alexander McLeay <zsau@...>:

> >It'll be interesting to see if and when and where this
> >spreads.  Another interesting dialectal fact I've noticed
> >upon moving to Chicago:  a significant number of people
> >here, most of whom aren't from the South, use <y'all>
> >for the second person plural pronoun.  Jerry Sadock,
> >the syntax professor here, informs me that <youse> is
> >also fairly widespread, but <y'all> is spreading faster.
> >That too does not surprise me;  there are between 75 and
> >100 million Southerners who use it.
>
> In Melbourne (at least) 'youse' isn't particularly plural. If I use it,
> I mean everyone I'm talking to, be it one or many and there are other
> who'll use it to mean 'you', both singular and plural. Do others' 'youse's
> and 'y'all's (or 'ya'll's) suffer from the same?
Nope.  Although, it is in my dialect fact *ungrammatical* to use
singular <you> to a waiter in a sentence like *"What kind of drinks do you
have?".  Clearly, you're not asking what kind of drinks the *waiter* has,
but what kind the establishment he works for has. (Of course, if you're
remarking about the shirt he's wearing, that's another matter, unless
that too is a company shirt.) This can be a source of confusion for
those who speak a dialect that does not feature a singular/plural
distinction in the second person.  I remember several years ago there
was a raging argument on <sci.lang> concerning a woman who was at a
restaurant in the South, was alone, and the waiter addressed her as
"y'all".  She insisted it was a <y'all> used in the singular, while
all of us who actually use the pronoun insisted that there must have
been some kind of external reason for it of the kind that I mention
above.

==============================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...>

"If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept,
but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further,
that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights,
then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going
to set something or someone on fire." Peter Green, in _From Alexander
to Actium_, on Spartan king Cleomenes III