Re: New Englishisms

At 8:21 pm -0500 15/3/99, Tim Smith wrote:
.....
>
>Where I live (Albany, New York), "you guys" is used often, but not
>consistently, in informal speech as a second-person plural by many people
>(including me), regardless of gender of the addressees.
I've come across exactly the same here in Old England & in South Africa.

>I also occasionally
>hear "youse", mostly from older working-class people.
Sounds as though the Irish immigrants to New England have left their mark  :)
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Later at 10:14 pm -0500 15/3/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>some Cook, Himes, or Concepcion wrote:
>> The standard example is the name of the town itself, which the
>> natives pronounce /nu 'brI? $/, where /$/ is a glottal nasal.  (I couldn't
>> find a glottal nasal symbol in Kirshenbaum.)
>
>Describe what you mean by "glottal nasal".  That's an impossible
>combination,
....which of course is why you'll not find the symbol in Kirshenbaum or in
the official IPA symbols  :)

We had this one explained quite recently.  A nasal is produced by causing
some block or closure in the vocal tract and allowing the air to pass
through the nasal cavity.  If the closure is made with the glottis then air
can no more pass through the nasal cavity than it can through the oral one.

['brI?n] is the common pronunciation over here.

Ray.