QUEBEC CRACKPOTS

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 12:38 PM 4/25/01 -0400, John Lacny wrote:
>I'm no linguist, but I'm intrigued by the number of regionalisms from the
>peculiar dialect of Da Burgh which are of Eastern European derivation.  In
>the "nouns" section (perhaps that should be "nahns" section?) of the
>Pittsburghese website
>(http://www.pittsburghese.com/glossary.ep.html?type=nouns) they list
>"babushka" and "dupa," among other words which are clearly not
>Pittsburghisms per se but words taken directly from Polish, Serbo-Croatian,
>etc.  Whether Pittsburgh's heavy Slavic-derived population has anything to
>do with the peculiar pronunciation ("dahntahn," "worsh," "Stillers," etc.)
>or regional vocabulary ("gumband," "jaggers," etc.) in other ways besides
>the obvious contributions of Slavic-derived words is unclear.

Some of it may be the peculiarities of E.E pronounciation of English
sounds, eg.

English [i] (like in ship) is pronounced as [ee] (like in sheep)
English [th] is pronounced as either [z] (e.g. "ze' instead of "the") [d]
(e.g. 'boder' instear of "bother" r sometimes [t] or [s] (eg. "teets"
instead of "teeth").

which looks like a possible influence onthe pronunciation of some of the
phrases listed on the website you quote.  But I would not discount Germanic
influences as well, especially the verb forms.

wojtek