Re: Scouse final plosives (was: vowel descriptions)

At 10:11 pm -0500 16/12/98, John Cowan wrote:
>Tom Wier scripsit:
>
>> Wow -- that's really interesting.  Do you have any idea when
>> this phenomenon began to occur?  Is it one of those dialectal
>> phenomena that's been around for centuries, but just few people,
>> except those in the area, talk about?
>
>Unlikely.  Scouse is a 19th century dialect, deriving from the collision
>of local speech with a huge influx of Irish immigrants;
Liverpool was a magnate for many nationalities; it is often jokingly called
"the capital of North Wales" because of the large number of Welsh imigrants
there.  And as an important sea port of former times, it tended to get
quite a variety of other nationals.  Many started from central or eastern
Europe to sail to 'the Land of the Free' and got no further than Liverpool.
My Scouse colleague's (great?) grandfather was one such, which accounts for
his Slav surname.

I guess he influences on Scouse are multifarious, tho Irish is most
certainly one of them.  Liverpool was an important staging post as they set
out for the hazardous voyage to the New World - and quite a few got no
further than Liverpool (tho many, of course, did make it to America).

>it continues
>to show stratification based on religion (which serves as a marker
>for national origin).
Undoubtedly true in the first half of this century - but the stupendous
efforts of the Anglican Archbiship and the late Catholic Archbishop in the
70s & 80s have done much to heal those divisions; my colleague is probably
classed as a 'non-practicing Protestant' - i.e. modern, non-religious
affiliation - but went to a Jewish school as a boy and, I'd guess, possibly
had some Catholic ancestry as his surname is of Polish origin.

Ray.