Yo
- From: Fred Springer <fred.springer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:15:31 GMT
Interesting article in this week's New Scientist, about the emergence among Baltimore teenagers of a non-gender-specific third person pronoun. Here are some extracts from it:
Elaine Stotko...is a linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland She was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her Linguistics for Teachers class asked, "Have you ever heard kids using 'yo' when they mean he or she?"
About half the teachers taking the course had also heard "yo" used in this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer (one of the teachers) to research this development, which they have now documented in the linguistics journal American Speech.
They found that from at least 2004 to the present day, middle-school and high-school students in Baltimore have been using "yo" as a gender-neutral personal pronoun in sentences such as: "Yo put his foot up" and "Yo looks like a freak".
Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says the emergence of "yo" is remarkable because it seems to be a spontaneous grass-roots phenomenon. "Most of the gender-neutral pronouns are artificial coinages that are then marketed - unsuccessfully - to users," he says.
Any aue readers come across this one? Incidentally, 'Yo put *his* foot up' looks self-defeating in this context. Shouldn't it be 'yos'?
.
- Prev by Date: Re: Enquiry on the MI5 guy
- Next by Date: Re: Yo
- Previous by thread: Contemporary Newspeak
- Next by thread: Re: Yo
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
