[HPFGU-OTChatter] Fw: Texas Facts

[Amanda]

Jennifer said

> Doesn't work for the Westheimer Street Festival, either, or any given
> music festival in central Texas, which is more than likely named in
> German.

My grandmother spent her teen years in a graceful house on a tree-lined
residential boulevard on the outskirts of Houston, called Westheimer. I have
a tape of a radio interview, when that house was made into a restaurant in
the 1970s. Her parents were active in the campaign to keep the city from
cutting down the trees to widen the street. She also tells that she was
having a slumber party for her 17th birthday, when the race riots were going
on, and how her parents could not keep the girls from, well, being girls at
a slumber party, and were terrified of attracting attention.

> And usually pronounced "fixinna".

Not where I live, easterner. Are you one of those "You-ston" people, who
leave the "H" off of Houston, too?

> >  > 16. You know whether another Texan is from east, west, north or south
> >Texas as soon as they open their mouth.
> >
> >Especially if they open it to spit.
>
> Texas is the only state in which the Southern, Western, and
> Midwestern accents are all native, in addition to the state's own
> accent.

Actually, my honors paper in college was on the Southern dialect in east
Texas, and we failed to find it. One of the leading lights of Texan
linguistics, Guy Bailey, was kind enough to talk to me and give me several
copies of his papers yet unpublished to use in my project. He says that the
Southern dialect is native only to people born around the turn of the
century (that's 1900, guys); soon after that it began to decline.

The dialect maps you see in linguistics books are based on data gathered in
the 1940s and 1950s, when the middle-aged and older informants *had* all
been born prior to or around the turn of the century. We found no native
Southern dialect speakers at all, in our toodle across east Texas through
several small towns.

This explains why my grandmother, native of east Texas, *did* have a
graceful Southern accent (we would beg her to say sugar and pepper and such,
to hear /shu-gah/ and /pep-pah/), using wonderful words like "gallery"
/gal-ree/ for porch and such, and my mother and uncle did not. Which little
oddness is what sent me off on this honors project in the first place.

So I don't think I'd consider the Southern dialect to be particularly native
to Texas anymore, but I don't know if any Authorities have weighed in on it
or if the standard linguistics maps have ever been updated.

Wake up! Hit "delete"!

--Amanda Binns rides again, sorry