Dags att skriva önskelista

När vi gick i första klass, hade Eva och jag en diskussion om huruvida man skulle skicka in sina tävlingssvar tidigt eller sent.  Eva ansåg att man borde skicka in svaren så sent som möjligt, för då skulle brevet med svaret komma överst i säcken och således borde chansen att just det brevet drogs, vara större. Jag, å andra sidan, trodde att man vände upp och ned på säcken, och då skulle det vara en fördel om mitt svar låg i botten.
Håller den teorin streck, borde det vara smart att skicka önskelistan för nästa år, nu. I fall tomten får mycket post, kanske han inte läser alla önskelistor, utan bara drar några ur säcken.
Eftersom jag hittat ytterligare en bok som jag vill ha, tänker jag skriva till tomten i dag och berätta att jag vill ha "Speaking American", en tämligen nyutkommen bok av lingvisten Richard Bailey. 
Så här skriver Rob Kyff, om boken:

"Speaking American," a recent book by the late linguist Richard Bailey, demonstrates that the regional speech patterns Kennedy used began in New England as early as the 1600s. 

How did Bailey know? Examining old New England town records, he discovered misspellings that reveal how certain words were pronounced. (Linguists call such nonstandard spellings "eye dialect" because the reader's eye sees what the ear hears, e.g., "enuff" for "enough," "offen" for "often.") 

In some 17th-century New England eye dialect, the "r" was omitted: "fouth" for "fourth," "bud" (bird), "pasneg" (parsonage), "Geoge" (George) and "Mos" (Morse). And today most Boston natives, including the "achtahs" Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, still drop the "r" in many words. 

In other colonial New England misspellings, however, an "r" was inserted: "hawsers" was spelled "horsers" and "Boston" was spelled "Borston," as in Kennedy's "idear" and "Cubar." 

Bailey also discovered that many other regional speech patterns are much older than you might think. 

Several terms still heard in western Pennsylvania, for instance, were imported by Scots-Irish immigrants during the 1700s: "poke" (a bag or sack), "redd" (tidy, as in "Please redd up your room"), "youns" (a second-person plural pronoun equivalent to the southern "ya'll"), "till" (to, as in "quarter till three") and "all" (as in "What all did she want?). 

Likewise, slaves who arrived in South Carolina during the 1600s and 1700s brought with them many West African terms still used today: "yam" (sweet potato), "okra" (plant), "gumbo" (soup) and "goober" (peanut). "Moco," which meant "magic, witchcraft" in the West African language Fula, eventually morphed into our word "mojo" (magical power). 

And, by examining eye dialect in Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella "Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto," Bailey discovered that today's New "Yoik" accent was thriving well before 1900. Chahan rendered "girl" as "goil" (girl), "furniture" as "foiniture," "though" as "dough" and "think" as "t'ink." 

So, to paraphrase JFK, the "wahhds" (or "woids") have indeed gone forth — from earlier centuries to our own. 

Visst låter den intressant! 
Jag vet inte vad “intrusive R” heter på svenska — men jag vet att vi har det. Min far som var från Gästrikland lade till ett r på många ord, till exempel skar och portmonär.