Re: yeah (was Re: Moraic codas)

Roger Mills wrote:
>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.
Actually, it was Daniel Andreasson who wrote that. The point is that long
[a:] doesn't occure in Swedish words ('xcept for the curse "fan" [fa:n], but
but that's another story).

>I wondered:  how about Norwegian or Danish?--
Well, we've got some Danes at least on the list - could [ja:] be from you?

                                                       Andreas

>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.
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