Re: YASGT: Adjectival agreement

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...> wrote:
> On 2009-02-12 Andreas Johansson wrote:
>>
>> In moderately careful speech I have [de:] (not [di:]) and
>>  [dOm]. Not sure if this reflects any "genuine" accent or
>>  is an artefact of my polydialectal upbringing.
>
> AFAIK no genuine dialect has [de:] for _de_, but only
> for _det_ or _det är_; in fact I seem to remember having
> read that all dialects that uphold the _de/dem_ distinction
> pronounce _de_ as [di] or something derived from that.
> The vowel is furthermore normally short IME, since
> these pronouns normally are unstressed.
I should have written [de(:)], [di(:)].

> The [di] pronunciation is probably very old, being
> shared by Danish and Norwegian where it is standard.
> I'd guess it goes back to the time when [i I e] were
> in free variation in unstressed position, i.e. before
> the 14th century in Swedish and even earlier in
> Danish.
Perhaps the change was helped along by the loss of 't' in _det_? _De_
"they" and _det_ "it" are homophones  in my ideolect, which is ...
suboptimal. It also causes me to type _de_ for _det_ with some
regularity.

>>>> FWIW when I speak Bohuslänska I have the -e/-a adjectival agreement
>>>> distinction for all historical masculines, not only the animate ones, and I
>>>> say _di_
>>>>  and _dêm_, but as far as I'm concerned that is a different language.
>>
>> One funny variant for adjectival agreement I saw advocated in a language
>> column in a students' newspaper was to use the -e forms only with masculine
>> proper names - I believe the example used was _den store upptäcktsresanden
>> Fridtjof Nansen_  v. _den stora upptäcktsresanden_ still refering to Nansen
>> but not actually naming him.
>
> That sounds like someone who feels they ought to use
> the -e forms, but can't be bothered to learn the proper
> rules.
It may be it, but it boggles my mind that anyone should think it
simpler than the "proper" rules.

>> My, possibly unjustified, impression is that the
>> stylistic value of upholding the distinction is moving
>> from educated to stuffy (I once saw a columnist actually
>> apologize for being old-fashioned enough to do it!).
>
> Aroun here (G-burg) all local speakers (with the possible
> exception of some young bimbos who more or less consciously
> want to sound like the bimbos on the TV shows) uphold the
> distinction, and it doesn't have any stylistic value at all,
> being just normal.  To me OTOH all-a sounds not just
> ungrammatical, but also semantically wrong, like denying the
> masculinity of the person referred to.  I know full well
> that it has no such implications to all-a speakers, but I
> can't help it *feels* so to me!  Curiously I have no
> corresponding feeling about all-e, probably because the
> only non-upholding person I talked to regularly as a kid
> was my grandfather, who was all-e (he was from
> Västergötland).
I'm more or less opposite - I hear the all-a version too often to
consciously notice it most of the time, but the all-e version makes me
cringe.


--
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?