grinner
11-29-2003, 11:11 AM
In Texas, some folks jus' fixin' to unnerstand
COLLEGE STATION, Texas "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?"
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That was the idea. John Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what he said that interested them most. It was how he said it.
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Those responses, part of an ambitious National Geographic Society survey of Texas speech, with its "y'alls," "might-coulds" and "fixin' to's," are helping language investigators throw light on a mythologized and sometimes ridiculed mainstay of Americana: the Texas twang
Among the unexpected findings, said Guy Bailey, a linguistics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading scholar in the studies with his wife, Jan Tillery, is that in Texas more than elsewhere, how you talk says a lot about how you feel about your home state.
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"Those who think Texas is a good place to live adopt the flat 'I' - it's like the badge of Texas," said Bailey, provost of the university and a transplanted Alabamian married to a Lubbock native. So if you love Texas, they say, be fixin' to say "naht" for "night," "rahd" for "ride" and "raht" for "right."
article continues at... http://www.iht.com/articles/119511.html
and no... this isn't a continuation of an earlier article/thread... this is just interesting.
COLLEGE STATION, Texas "Are yew jus' tryin' to git me to talk, is that the ah-deah?"
.
That was the idea. John Greer, an architecture teacher at Texas A&M University, sat at his dining table between two interrogators and their tape recorder. They had precisely 258 questions for him. But it waddn what he said that interested them most. It was how he said it.
.
Those responses, part of an ambitious National Geographic Society survey of Texas speech, with its "y'alls," "might-coulds" and "fixin' to's," are helping language investigators throw light on a mythologized and sometimes ridiculed mainstay of Americana: the Texas twang
Among the unexpected findings, said Guy Bailey, a linguistics professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a leading scholar in the studies with his wife, Jan Tillery, is that in Texas more than elsewhere, how you talk says a lot about how you feel about your home state.
.
"Those who think Texas is a good place to live adopt the flat 'I' - it's like the badge of Texas," said Bailey, provost of the university and a transplanted Alabamian married to a Lubbock native. So if you love Texas, they say, be fixin' to say "naht" for "night," "rahd" for "ride" and "raht" for "right."
article continues at... http://www.iht.com/articles/119511.html
and no... this isn't a continuation of an earlier article/thread... this is just interesting.