Re: yeah (was Re: Moraic codas)

Andreas Johansson wrote
>....Swedish "ja"  jA:] ......>
I think it was you, Andreas, who also mentioned this in reply to my comments
on upper-midwest/"Fargo"  "yah" [ja:] (I couldn't find your original
reply......)-- and suggested that our pronunciation could not come directly
from _Swedish_ influence.  I wondered:  how about Norwegian or Danish?--
quite aside from German.  Also, by early 1900s, the children of all the
original immigrants would already have been exposed to mid-west English,
which probably had no [A]; and certainly by my times (born mid-30s) their
Swedish [A] would have been long forgotten.

In Minnesota, I think, Swedish speaking groups survived into the 1950s (in
Minneapolis I once attended a Lutheran service in Swedish-- very exotic,
almost like going to Mass!); but even in my sizeable small town only the
very elderly still spoke their original languages; my contemporaries did not
AFAIK.