Am I rubbing off on some of y'all? I noticed Sjoerd used the word "reckon" in his post in the Chincoteague thread. Surely they didn't teach you that in English class, did they, Sjoerd? It is an old-fashioned word commonly used by rural people in the South these days.
Sorry to disappoint you WTxDaddy, but we learn "reckon", "thrice", "y'all" and more besides in school here. We get to read lots of funny stuff, watch videos and listen to tapes. Then there's this wonderful thing called western movies. Even though the purist teachers try to remove such weed from our Oxford English, it doesn't always help.
lol,,,the first time my husband said reckon, i just looked. I asked him where he got that from, because i never used the word even after living in the deep south of the states. He said its a word he has always used and didn't remember when he started to use it, but said the same thing as Droopy, probably from the tv, movies, books,, and such. Even now, sometimes we speak mostly norwegian, sometimes english, and his english is more slang than mine is, and i lived there a good part of my life!
Heh heh...I suspect that I got that word from all the correspondence that I have with folk on the English Isle, plus the British television ststions which we can reseive here. Of course being an acute observer of language, when I hear or see words I try and understand their use and apply it in my conversations with people of that language. So that means that when I read the posts on the fora here that I don't miss many terms...and I file them away for use at a later date, when I feel I understand their proper meaning and use. A further note is my like of the obscure american musical dicipline called "Bluegrass". This has always interested me so much in all it's fine nuances. I like the roots of it, the music, the vocal harmonizing, the texts and the origin and meanings of the texts. The word use and pronunciation is part of what I find attractive. I suppose that I look at this in a sort of scientific-anthropologic way...but I do so enjoy this unique musical form. The sometimes archaic word use is part and parcal of the genre (or sub-genre) as a whole, but I wonder if people still talk like that somewhere. The people here always refer to bluegrass as country or country and western music, but I disagree strongly as I see it as something totally different from these two. Anyway...I believe that such words as 'reckon' probably are used in these tests too. I don't actually know when I started using these sorts of words, they're all mixed in with the rest.
Cool! "Reckon" is falling out of use in America. People in large cities never use it, unless they're imitating country folk! I use it and I actually purposefully throw archaic terms into my speech to keep the terms alive. My brother lives in a suburb of Dallas & he does not want his daughters sounding too country. Whenever his daughters are aroundmy family, they end up saying things like "y'all" and "fixin' to". Now, "fixin' to" is not falling into disuse around these parts. Nobody says, "I'm going to do this, or that." We all say, "I'm fixin' to......" Like, here's a good, pertinent use: I am fixin' to go on vacation in Florida! I get made fun of at work, because in legal documents & talking to judges, I use proper English - not Oxford, ut standard American English & I try to keep the twanging in check. But in other situations, I let the texan speech fly! A lady from Montana insists that I twang more the more beer I drink! I like talking like I'm from somewhere & not sounding like I could be from anywhere in the Midwest. I want my daughter to be readily identifiable as a Texan when she ventures into foreign lands (that means anyplace outside Texas). People in big cities in Texas don't sound much like Texans any more. I think it's tragic. Why do we all want to be alike? My brother & his wife set up their estate plan for my wife & me to raise their daughters, if anything were to happen to them. We set ours up for my wife's sister to raise our daughter, were the unthinkable to happen to us. My brother & his wife were kind of insulted. Our explanation: we love y'all, but we want our daughter to be raised in a rural area and learn about farming & show pigs at the stock show like her cousins on my wife's side and I do not want her growing up on a huge slab of concrete crowded with millions of people. Sort of snobbish, I guess, but I want her to be a country girl like her mother and know how to grow her own food. If civilization collapses (and who says it hasn't already?), the people in cities are going to suffer a great deal!
*sneaking the soap box away from underneath WTxDaddy's feet* I understand the way you think. This is not a problem for us, since Norwegian dialects have lived and developed since who-knows-when, and continue to do so. They get a bit flattened out somewhat as time passes, but are still very identifiable, at least to Norwegian ears. I think I wrote about words falling into disuse in my blog some time back. I used to be able to tell a Glouchestershire person from a Yorkshire person, but now they just sound "English" to me. And Americans sound American. I can identify a Texan as long as they speak with the proper twang though, and the Scotch, Irish and aussies also have a distinct pronunciation. I also think it's fun to try and place Europeans by the way they speak English. That's a hobby I enjoy when vacationing in Greece. I'm a simple soul to please. *folding up the soap box and handing it along*
WTxDaddy you'd fit right in here in S. Ga. That sorta language is common here. We can always tell when someone is not from around here.
Well I've lived in New England, New Hampshire most of my life up until 9 years ago, spending the last 9 years in Maine and I use "reckon" and "y'all" all the time. I have no "twang" being from the north east. I'm not even really sure how I started using them, I've used them as far back as I can remember. The "fixing to" is new to me, I like it. :-D
But, it ain't "fixing to", it's "fixin' to". You gota drop the "G" to sayit right. - Just kidding. We can always tell when a person is not from here, when they say "fixing to" and not "fixin' to". I suppose we should spellit like this: "fixxen". I think reckon was used more regularly in the 19th century. I suppose the only form of it we hear in most American speech these days is "reckoning", when we mean a person is about to reap what they've sown. We also use the made-up word "comeuppance" - as in, ultimately, a bad person is going to get what's coming to them. When I was in graduate school, reading middle high German prose & poetry, it finally dawned on me how closely related our languages are. It fascinated me that we could (or, our ancestors) could start with the same root word & then, due to separation, have the word develop so differently acorss a wide area. When I was an exchange student in Germany in 1976, I was amazed at how much local northern German dialects sounded like English with a heavy accent at times.
No, I don't think so. I also have problems ID-ing South Africans. Probably due to lack of training. I haven't met many from those areas.
I learned english in western Pennsylvania, lived in Alabama, and in South Dakota. Language was always facinating to me. In Pa. they have a form of y'all, said yinz, and there is even a plural, said yunz. took me a while to figure those out, comming from another country. But when i did master the dialect from Pa, I could spot a person from anywhere in the states and knew what area they were from. When i lived in Alabama, the fixin to, was said fittin to, no -x- or -g-, reckon was used, and the phrase, going to or gotta was said -gon-. The peoples of the mid-west spoke the most proper (if there is a such a thing) american english i have heard, but there was a distinct dialect. Their words at the end of a sentence went up in tone. Everything sounded like a question, even if it was said like a fact. And the phrase "you bet" and "right on" is said religiously there for everything. Now i have fun trying to figure out the norwegian dialects,,, and i know up here it is like no where else,,lol. very hard to understand. but Bergen got us all beat i think,, i have no clue what they are saying,,,lol.
Well WTD, it's no wonder that the languages ,English and German are similar...those two and Dutch as well as a host of other languages are in the same "class" called "Germanic Languages", encopmpasing central northern and southern germanic language groups. If you go to this Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages and scroll to the bottom, there is an interesting (albeit small) "Vocabulary Comparison Chart" to look at. It's fun to look at the languages that we all use or have some knowledge of to see the likenesses and differences. Of course this all has little to do with the use of words like "fixin' to" or "reckon", but it is nonetheless interesting to recognize that all of us here do have the bond of a similar Language classification. I was gonna say that I reckon it strengthens the bond of us Stewbies. There, I've said it. Now I have to get back to what I was fixin' t'do before I started reading the postings.
Youve got yourself a southern accent y'all. I've got myself another southern gardener. Enjoy your posts. Gardengater
I used to get counted off when I did an oral report in English. I would right it "proper" but say in my way. I'm in Indiana, but my mom was from Kentucky. My daughter is in collage, and everyone thinks she's from the south!
