CHAPTER XX
IDIOMS AND ARISTOCRACY
Southerners have told me that they can tell from what part of the South
a person comes, by his speech, just as an Easterner can distinguish, by
the same means a New Englander, a New Yorker, a Middle-Westerner, and a
Brooklynite. I cannot pretend to have become an authority upon southern
dialect, but it is obvious to me that the speech of New Orleans is
unlike that of Charleston, and that of Charleston unlike that of
Virginia.
The chief characteristic of the Virginian dialect is the famous and
fascinating localism which Professor C. Alphonso Smith has called the
"vanishing _y_"--a _y_ sound which causes words like "car" and "garden"
to be pronounced "cyar" and "gyarden"--or, as Professor Smith prefers to
indicate it: "C^{y}ar" and "g^{y}arden." I am told that in years gone by
the "vanishing _y_" was common to all Virginians, but though it is still
common enough among members of the old generation, and is used also by
some young people--particularly, I fancy, young ladies, who realize its
fetching quality--there can be no doubt that it is, in both senses,
vanishing, and that not half the Virginians of the present day
pronounce "cigar" as "segyar," "carpet" as "cya'pet," and "Carter," as
"Cyahtah."
In Virginia and many other parts of the South one hears such words as
"aunt" correctly pronounced with the broad _a_, and such words as "tube"
and "new" properly given the full _u_ sound (instead of "toobe," and
"noo," as in some parts of the North); but, on the other hand, while the
South gives the short _o_ sound in such words as "log" and "fog," it
invariably calls a dog a "dawg.
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