The Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1890-1906, 1892-12-07
GOTHAM'S DIALECT.
Peculiarities of Pronunciation OBJ
served in New York
Strangers in the Great City Are ut Once
Detected by Their speech-Ths
Peculiar Habit Formed In
Public Schools.

How many persons Know that New
York city has a dialect of its own, and
one that it maintains in purity by
teaching it in the public schools? says
correspondents of the Providence Jour
nal Many persons have commented on
the precision with which New Yorker
can spot stranger the instant the
stranger undertakes to pronounce the
names of the principal streets in the
town We call it Broadway, etnphasiz-
ing the last syllable very strongly. 1t
appears to be quite trick to do this
and it is evidently an unnatural pro-
nunciation, for we notice that the very
great majority Of strangers say broab-
wab. So we spot them on the instant
and ask them from what part of the
country they hail, just to show them
that there is something about them that
Is not cityfed. and to set them puzzling
about whether it is in the shape of their
hat or the style of their shoes, or what
1t is. People from the south betray the
fact by calling our Houston street
"Hewston street." as that name is pro-
nounced from Texas to the Chesapeake,
but we play as strange a trick with an
other name; for we call Coenties slip
Quincy slip" AS 10 one would do
that naturally we detect strangers by
that pronunciation. The name Of Ho-
boken is another that we trifie with,
calling it Habbucken, instead of as
we should. But in ways and by words
other than these I can pick out
New Yorker anywhere that he
and may meet, whether it be in Bos-
ton or in the Rocky mountains. l can
do this by noticing how he pronounces
the ''ur" sound in such words as birth,
bird, earth, heard, etc. All the rest of
the country pronounce those words
burth, brrd, urth and hurd Not so the
New Yorker. He is carefully taught
not to do so in all the public schools, rs
well as by his parents at home. The
queer little twist that enters so largely
into our language in marring one OF
the cardinal sounds that compose it is
thus expressed by our tongues: Ur-yith
is how we say earth; bur-yid is how we
say bird. We say hur-yid for heard and
mur-yid-der for murder. All of us who
were born in New York have heard the
public school-teacher insisting upon
this peculiar twist; commanding the pu-
pills to put on the trade mark as fighting
men once wore the coat of arms of their
feudal masters. Most of us, too, have
heard nice careful little girls on the
way home from school correcting care
less companions by insisting that you
mustn't say burd; you must say it nicely,
bur-yid."
OF all the senseless and unmusical
and bad things that are done to Eng
hsh that is one Of the worst, because
one expects to hear a language at its
best in the greatest city of a country,
and thither foreigners repair to study
English and then prepare to go back
home and teach it with whole lot of
little tricks like that in their heads, TO
be solemnly taught and scattered, until
no one knows where the mischief will
end. Of course, l do not want the
reader to understand that very nice
people murder the language in these or
any other ways, but the great masses
of New Workers. those who get their
learning in the public schools and
whose tongues were trained in old New
York homes OF the middle class-these
are the victims of this peculiar habit