Pittsburghese

[greg42]

Actually, slippy is one that we talk about around here and go okay, why isn't that a word? I mean, it starts with slip, just slip. So why should the -er be in there? No need for it. Slippy would work just fine and be closer to normal compared to other words.

[Fiddlehead]

Originally Posted by greg42

Actually, slippy is one that we talk about around here and go okay, why isn't that a word? I mean, it starts with slip, just slip. So why should the -er be in there? No need for it. Slippy would work just fine and be closer to normal compared to other words.

I agree. That is why I think the King's English is a dog's breakfast. All sorts of exceptions to common sense rules.

New
Shoe
Do
Moo
View
Blue
Who
Hew
Hue

Etc,etc,etc....
I am teaching a child to read now, and he is not impressed!

[Joshbarblahblah]

I think that dialects are a wonderful thing - language is a living, changing concept. Formalized language, such as King's English or Queen's English or whatever you want to call it, is a relatively new concept (in the grand scheme of history).

I've always thought that "yinz" was a reflection of Pittsburgh's Italian influence because Italian, like all romance languages, has two different words for "you." "Tu" - for one person, informal. "Voi" - for more than one person, or formal. So Pittsburghers can say "you" in the singular or "yinz" in the plural. It's easier and more efficient than saying "you guys" and clearer (at least to us) than just using one form of "you" for both singular and plural settings.

I'm not a linguist, though, so I don't know if "yinz" stems from any romance language influence. It's just what I've always thought.

[Fiddlehead]

Originally Posted by Joshbarblahblah

I think that dialects are a wonderful thing - language is a living, changing concept. Formalized language, such as King's English or Queen's English or whatever you want to call it, is a relatively new concept (in the grand scheme of history).

I've always thought that "yinz" was a reflection of Pittsburgh's Italian influence because Italian, like all romance languages, has two different words for "you." "Tu" - for one person, informal. "Voi" - for more than one person, or formal. So Pittsburghers can say "you" in the singular or "yinz" in the plural. It's easier and more efficient than saying "you guys" and clearer (at least to us) than just using one form of "you" for both singular and plural settings.

I'm not a linguist, though, so I don't know if "yinz" stems from any romance language influence. It's just what I've always thought.

I have read, and BrianTH posted above, that Pittsburghese sayings like yinz are derived from an old Scots-Irish dialect. They was a huge slug of Scots-Irish that emigrated from the Ulster plantation area of Ireland (Presbyterian folks from N. England-S. Scotland originally who were encouraged to colonize lands taken from the vanquished Gaelic-Catholic kings in ~1600s) in the early-mid 1700s. As they had been oppressed for their religion in N. Ireland, they were used to fighting for it and not tolerant (can you say fundamentalist...), and were not the peace-loving, tolerant farmers the Quaker founders of PA were looking for. Supposedly, the Quakers encouraged them to head west over the Alleghenies, rather than muck things up their., figuring, I think, they would be good on the frontier, battling indians,etc. ...Anyhow, the first place they settled in any number was W. PA, then continued to flow south to people Appalachia, laying a base coat of Celtic culture and dialect to that whole region (Not my ideas, loosely paraphrased from Born Fighting-Senator Jim Webb's history of the Scots-Irish).

So I am wondering, having not been there, if the Pittsburgh yinzer dialect is closer to the NYC/Jersey/Philly Italian joe (Fagettaboutit!) dialect, or has more connections with the Appalachian way of speaking. The clues I have read here suggest it could go either way...

[fleetiebelle]

that Pittsburghese sayings like yinz are derived from an old Scots-Irish dialect.

Sometimes if you watch an Irish movie or listen to an actual Irish person, they'll say something that sounds like "yinz", though it might actually be "yous".

[Copanut]

Yinz is a second-person plural pronoun used mainly in southwest Pennsylvania, northeast Ohio, as well as Pittsburgh, but it is also found throughout the Appalachians. (See: Pittsburgh English.)
Yinz is the most recent derivation from the original Scots-Irish form you ones, which is probably the result of contact between Irish and English. When standard-English speakers talk in the first person or third person, they use different pronouns to distinguish between singular and plural. In the first person, for example, speakers use the singular I and the plural we. But when speaking in the second person, you performs double duty as both the singular form and the plural form. Crozier (1984) suggests that during the 19th century, when many Irish speakers switched to speaking English, they filled this gap with you ones, primarily because Irish has a singular second-person pronoun, tu, as well as a plural form, sibh. The following therefore is the most likely path from you ones to yinz: you ones [ju wʌnz] > you'uns [juʌnz] > youns [junz] > yunz [jʌnz] > yinz [jɪnz]. Because there are still speakers who use each form, there is no stable second-person plural pronoun form in southwest or central Pennsylvania—which is why this pronoun is variably referred to or spelled as you'uns, "y'uns" yunz, yuns, yinz, yins or ynz.

[BrianTH]

Incidentally, that makes yinz/you-ones roughly equivalent to y'all/you-all, youse/you-guys, you-lot, and so on--people have cobbled together a second person plural pronoun for English on many occasions. So they don't have to have a common specific origin: it just people trying to address a need unmet by "standard" English.