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Re: fingers

From:Thomas Wier <trwier@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 29, 2005, 14:51
Adam Walker wrote:
> Well, if it is originally a Scotish borrowing from > Dutch, I would expect it to be most common in those > areas of the country with the highest emmigration of > Scots, ie the South. My family all uses the word. We > are all Southerners, have been for as long as 400 > years on some braches of the family. There is a high > concentration of Scotish blood in the family and also > several Dutch lines. I don't think the useage in > theis country is anything new, but I do think it may > have been a regional usage until not so long ago. > Southern usages have been gaining prestige.
That seems quite possible to me. My family's always lived south of the Ohio as well, and my family is mostly Scottish (indeed, mostly the same clan, MacNaughton). Several centuries ago, before the Act of Union, Scotland was a much poorer place, and many Scots emigrated to other parts of Europe (one Scot figured prominently in the Thirty Years' War, in which England had little or no part). Several of my Scottish ancestors lived on the continent in this way: Rev. Malcom Wier (b. ca 1516) died in Geneva; his grandson John Wier (aka Jan Vyer, b. ca 1645) lived in Amsterdam; the latter's son Dr. John Wier lived in Brussels, and his children returned to live in Scotland only to move later to Northern Ireland thence another generation later to South Carolina some time in the late 18th century. Anyways, that's a round-about way of saying that I find it quite possible that the vector for introducing words was Scottish, and that this was taken thence to America. Question: how common is "pinky" in the New York area? Dutch Americans living in what became New York would be another vector for the word. ========================================================================= Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally, Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of 1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter. Chicago, IL 60637

Replies

Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>OT fingers and genealogy
Elliott Lash <erelion12@...>