Re: NYT: As Opera Audience Shrinks, the Met Gets Daring

Brendan R. Wehrung wrote:

"Peter T. Daniels" (grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Cub Driver wrote:

On Thu, 16 Feb 2006 13:37:09 GMT, "Peter T. Daniels"
<grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I used always to edit out the "of" in such constructions, and "all of
the people," etc.; but I once had an editor insist on inserting "of" in
such cases in things I'd written, so I now realize that there are some
people for whom the "of" is necessary, and none for whom it's
impossible, and I leave it in when it's there.

My lady English teacher regarded "off of" as one of the Three Signs of
Illiteracy. In consequence, so do I.

Your editor should have been sweeping the floors, and probably now is.
Either that or he is president of HarperCollins.

Spoken like a true never-been-exposed-to-linguistics. The same goes for
your "lady English teacher" -- is that quaint phrase yours, or hers?

What are her other Two Signs?

No one ever mentioned "off of" in New York City, because it's not part
of the local dialect. Nor is "all the farther," but we learned from our
"grammar" books that people who said it weren't supposed to say it. Then
I moved to Chicago and discovered that people actually do say it. Every
day.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

So you had no trouble understanding what is coming to be called the
Northern Cities dialect?

I don't understand the question. There's no "Northern Cities Dialect";
there's a "Northern Cities Shift," which involves changes in the
phonetic realization of many vocalic phonemes, which is taking place in
many cities in the northern US and southern Canada, from about Buffalo
westward (though now excluding Erie, PA, which has fallen under the
influence of the very distinctive Pittsburgh-area dialect).

As William Labov, who identified the Northern Citis Shift, likes to
demonstrate, single words taken in isolation (snipped from recordings of
connected speech) are likely to be unidentifiable, because the vowel
quality is not expected, but hearing the same snippet in a few-seconds
context is enough to make it fully understandable.

The main differences between the Chicago and New York City dialects (not
that either is a uniform speech-community for its millions of
inhabitants) lie in the low-front vowel phonology (New York pronounces
"have" and "halve" differently; most of the US doesn't, using the
"halve" vowel for both) and the interdentals, which in NY (as in most of
English) are fricatives, "th," and in Chicago are dental stops (the "Da
Bears" phenomenon) but distinct from the alveolar stops for t and d as
throughout English. Plus the handful of regionalisms like those
mentioned above.

(Chicago, being east of the Mississippi, does not [yet] participate in
the cot/caught merger. Some years ago, Madison-based, Milwaukee-born
Michael Feldman took his "Whadya Know?" radio comedy and game show on
the road to Washington State, where he interviewed a lady who ran what
sounded to me like the Hock Winery [an odd name, since hock is
considered an inferior wine]. He too was confused; it later transpired
that it was the Hawk Winery.)

(An office colleague from southern Idaho told me that in her native
dialect, the two vowels were reversed -- her example being, "Lard, I
didn't put any lord in the skillet!")
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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