A fine post from bulbulistan redivivus, that collection of writings of bulbul/Slavo (see this LH post):
Hans Stumme (1864-1936) was a German linguist whose work is is probably known to anyone interested in Berber and North-African varieties of Arabic. Stumme travelled a lot and collected huge amounts of spoken data from – inter alia – Tunisians, Išelḥiyen and the Maltese. […] It is quite clear that Stumme was particularly interested in collecting folk literature, such fairytales and songs, where his books remain an invaluable source of data for folklorists. At the same time, Stumme’s work is extremely valuable for the study of the languages involved […]
This applies doubly to Maltese where there have been at least two major studies of the fairytales (1, 2). As far as I can tell, there is little focus in reevaluating Stumme’s dialectological work (but that might change soon), which is a shame, because there is so much fascinating stuff in there. Like for example song no. 70 from the collection of Maltese songs (Kössler-Ilg and Stumme 1909, p. 27). I am reproducing the text below in standard Maltese orthography and Stumme’s original German translation accompanied by my English one based on the Maltese text.
Ta’ dobra sejrin jsiefru […]
Die Slawen wollen abreisen […]
The Slavs are about to leave […]
A note here: the phrase tathom qalbhom is a bit of a mystery. […]
But that is not why we are here. We are here for the multi-word expression in bold that Stumme translates as the ethnonym “Slavs”. The composition of the expression is clear: the element ta’ is what Arabic dialectology refers to as genitive exponent, i.e. possession marker, the equivalent of ‘of’. In North African varieties, it usually takes the form mtāʕ/ntāʕ etc., the apostrophe at the end of ta’ is what remained of ʕ in Maltese. ta’ (or tal- with a definite article) + NOUN is how Maltese creates group names: ta’ Lejber ‘Labourists’, tal-PN ‘nationalists (lit. of Partit Nazzjonalista)” are perhaps the most prominent examples. Similarly, in a version of the Maltese translation of Bandiera rossa, the first verse goes Tal-pinna o ħutna, ukoll tal-mazza where pinna is ‘pen’ and mazza is ‘sledgehammer’, the two expressions meaning ‘intellectuals’ and ‘workers’.
What the of the dobra? That is quite simple; as Stumme himself puts it on p. 11, we’re dealing with “die Leute, die immer dobra ‘gut!’ sagen” (“the people who always say dobra ‘good!'”). That we do so and that we are perceived as such I can attest to from personal experience, recalling for example an Albanian lady in a B&B in Italy who upon learning that I am Slovak went “Oh you are one of the dobre dobre people!” That this is also how the Maltese thought of us back in the late 19th century is fascinating. Now the question remains which Slavs are these, since the general adverb of agreement usually takes the form dobre/dobro. The only language I can think of where people use a form with an [a] at the end is Czech, but there the vowel is long and considering the geography of the region, it is more likely that Maltese would encounter South Slavs. So probably not Czechs and definitely not the Polish or Slovaks, otherwise it would either be ta’ dopxe or, of course, ta’ kurva.
To je dobré!
In my long sojourn in Poland I observed that Poles do indeed say “dobra!” where I initially naively expected them to use the adverb “dobrze!”. It has become part of my Polish idiolect, though by way of elucidation I can only say that “dobrze!” sounds more like “ok”, “fine”, while “dobra!” is more like “that’s good!”. Of course you can’t include a word like “to” = “that”, because that would then force the neuter-gendered “dobre”, so it’s really limited to the one-word utterance “dobra!”
All the same, I doubt Poles are the source of this Maltese phrase.
Thanks, that’s excellent information.
In my long sojourn in Poland I observed that Poles do indeed say “dobra!” where I initially naively expected them to use the adverb “dobrze!”
I can confirm that, up to the fact that I had the same initial naive expectation.
And seeing how Polish exiles ended up everywhere in Europe in the 19th century after the partitions, Napoleonic wars, and various uprisings, I wouldn’t exclude them as source.
Dubrovnik 1971, on a school educational cruise of the Mediterranean *, we were recommended to use ‘dobre dian’ to ingratiate ourselves with the locals.
The same phrase seemed to work in Split, Korčula on a fleet sailing holiday mid-80’s.
No evidence of Poles either place.
* Don’t ask. On a rusting hulk S.S. Uganda that had been a troop ship.
This sort of exonym (based on a characteristic-or-stereotypical utterance of the group in question) is also exemplified by the antique-French “les goddams” for Englishmen. Are there other examples? I can think of American local ones like Yinzers or Yats. The old Greek “hoi barbaroi” is conceptually similar but perhaps weaker as to its empirical basis.
Confirming everything about Polish.
Standard FYLOSC dobar dan (“good day”), but I would not at all be surprised to learn that the form in Dubrovnik is much more like dobre dian.
ataltane,
indeed, so it has been for a while, e.g. in the 1932 novel “Kariera Nikosia Dyzmy” (p. 123, 151 etc.) and its 2002 brilliant movie adaptation.
I am reliably informed that there was a time when Quebecois tourists in Cuba were locally know as “los tabarnacos”.
@dm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c4wxqvMJLeo
I know this is not Croatian, but he says e.g., finiastra and trianta. So there is e>ia in some places in this Dalmatian accent. But then we have dobar *den instead of dobar dan as the starting point….
Are there other examples?
“Frafra” for the Gurunse (Gurenne [ya] fara fara “salutations!”)
“Jamsay” for the Dogon language so called, in which it’s a greeting, literally “health only.” (Interestingly, jam and say are actually both loanwords.)
“Yam yam” for the English dialect natively spoken by John Enoch Powell (along with many other more respectable people.)
Langue d’Oc …
I seem to recall learning on this very site that there are Australian languages whose exonyms reflect their words for “no.” As with all topics of potential human interest (and some others), we have discussed this previously at the Hattery.
Hellonyms? Swearonyms? Someone here who has Greek can do these properly.
We discussed the phenomenon not long ago, and even before that, referring to shibbolethonyms.
Speaking of exonyms, DavidM’s comment on one of my other posts reminded me of the existence German population of Eastern Slovakia, specifically Lower Spiš and North Abov, who are known in Slovak as Manták (pl. Mantáci). The most likely theory of the origin of the name is that it comes from the German phrase “Bos maant a?” (“What is he saying?”). The Slovak Wiki entry adds that the similarly sounding Hungarian phrase “Mit mondta?” with almost the same meaning (“What did you (polite) say”) may have contributed to this exonym which is now accepted by the community itself.
and some others
Let’s not separate ourselves from our nonhuman visitors…
@J.W. Brewer
Lemkos and Boykos.
@bulbul
The miniseries from 1980 is somewhat more faithful to the book.
Me: We discussed the phenomenon not long ago
…and even more recently yet, making this the fourth time this comes up, which I don’t think is at all too much.
Chaeresionyms and blasphemionyms.
Needs a hypernym, though, for “language or ethnic group name based on a (supposedly) characteristic utterance in the group’s own speech.”
Deigmatonym?
Vuzvuz.
Obviously there’s a fuzzy line between glottonyms and ethnonyms, but I was focused solely on the latter. Situations like “yamyam” or “yinzer” where the “ethnos” in question is basically defined as speakers of an identifiable dialect of the national language seem kind of borderline in terms of trying to maintain the distinction.
You can find dictionaries suggesting that “Occitan” in English can mean “human being from the historically Occitan-speaking part of France,” but it’s not particularly easy to find an actual published sentence using the word in that sense. And ditto for “Languedocian” as meaning “human being from the historical province of Languedoc.” Carlyle refers in his rather rococo discussion of the events of 1789 et seq. to the comte d’Antraigues as a “young Languedocian gentleman” (in Carlyle’s quotation marks, so maybe ironic or something?) but that adjectival use isn’t quite there.
The long-resident Hispanic people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado were called manitos by more recent Spanish-speaking immigrants because they (the non-immigrants) called each other manito/a, diminutives of Mexican Spanish mano/a (which I know only from a song lyric, so I can’t swear the feminine was used), short for hermano/a ‘brother, sister’. “Manito” has been adopted in English, mostly academic as far as I know, but now it’s pretty much obsolete. I’ve “heard” it (on Facebook) from just one person, who’s a traditionalist in many ways.
@JWB:
The Gurunse do actually use “Farefare” as a self-designation for their own ethnic group when speaking English, though for reasons which are opaque to me, they regard the form “Frafra” itself as pejorative, or at least disprefer it. You even get Fãrfãrsɩ used (sometimes) as a self-designation by the Ninkarse, as well as by the Gurense proper, and Fãrfãre for the language that they speak different dialects of.
Neither the whole politically-defined ethnic group nor the whole linguistically-demarcated language (which mostly match, though not completely) actually have traditional overarching names in the language itself, which may have facilitated the nativisation of the exonym, I suppose.
The local custom is to equate language names with ethnic group names, but this tends to work the other way round from the usual European pattern: the glottonyms are transparently derived from the ethnonyms, and may thus end up reflecting political rather than linguistic criteria.
For example, Nabit is unequivocally misclassified by Ethnologue, as a “Farefare” dialect, but it’s actually extremely close to Toende Kusaal, and would certainly be called a Kusaal dialect if the speakers themselves regarded themselves as Kusaasi; instead, they’re part of the Farefare/Gurunse chieftaincy setup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabit_language
(Farefare and Kusaal are both Western Oti-Volta languages, but they’re not particularly close to each other at all, and they’re far from being mutually comprehensible. Roughly Swedish versus German.)
Was meint er “what does he mean” – have all German language islands undergone [w] > [b]?!?
(Except the westernmost one, Issime/Eischeme above the Aosta valley, which has simply kept the [w] unchanged.)
@David E.: Has anyone developed a numerical Mohs scale of hardness to understand, ranging from pairs such as Cleveland-Chicago (I once had to ask a Chicagoan what “hosey” meant) through Farefare-Kusaal to Icelandic-Bengali, with perhaps a score of ∞ for Dyirbal-Pirahã?
ETA: With recognition of asymmetries, as recently discussed here.
have all German language islands undergone [w] > [b]?!?
Must ask my sister, who has some exposure to Geauga County Amish German.
ETA: That may cast some doubt on “westernmost”.
(Must think of everything before hitting “Save”.)
I think we’ve discussed a couple of groups of languages with no-based names… Gamilaraay, Yuwaalaraay, and so on, and Gubbi Gubbi-Waka Waka-Yugambeh further north east. I suspect the extent to which these are exonyms is easily overstated, in that while there are popular alternative endonyms in at least one case, they are all examples of a fairly widespread pattern of describe languages and the people speaking them in terms of particular words, including the yes-based Bigambul, this-based Galibal and what-based Minyangbal, some of which are used for subsets (or overlapping classifications?) of other names.
@JF:
Yes. Examples here, for example:
https://www.sil.org/resources/publications/entry/9184
SIL are (or used to be) quite into this sort of thing, as a way of finding out if they should be funnelling resources into a new Bible translation, or whether the group in question could manage perfectly well with an existing one in a related language-or-dialect.
(In this particular case, the decision eventually got trumped by politics: Burkina Faso Kusaasi all speak Toende dialect, so Bible translation efforts by organisations on the Burkina side ended up using Toende, instead of the Agolle dialect which the majority of Ghanaian Kusaasi speak. The dialects are actually rather closer than Berthelette’s report suggests: a lot of the data are quite iffy, in retrospect. Ghanaian Toende Kusaasi seem to manage OK with the Agolle Kusaal Bible version.)
@Jonathan D:
Thanks!
@JF: DARE says hosey is a New England term, used to stake a claim (like dibs elsewhere). Is that the one you mean?
he German phrase “Bos maant a?” (“What is he saying?”)
An understandable mispronunciation of واش معنتها waš ma`nǝtha? (“What does it mean?”)
I grew up in New Hampshire and have never heard of hosey. Either it’s very much a Boston word or it’s obsolete. Since I never heard my children use it either I suspect the latter, although they grew up in Newton, which linguistically is a world away from South Boston or even Marblehead.
The DARE examples are mostly Boston, one from Maine, and the earliest (1927) from NYC. In 1986 it was “Common especially in eastern Massachusetts, but elsewhere in the state too.”
Link. That one is apparently free, unlike most of the dictionary.
I just checked with two friends of mine who grew up in more „authentic“ Boston (Brighton and Danvers) in the 1970s and they both remembered saying „hosey“. Although my Brighton friend remembers the expression fading away as they became teenagers, and being replaced by „I call it!“
We discussed the phenomenon not long ago, and even before that — another on 6 July 2023.
Also probably “spiggoty”>”spic”; and, perhaps even more offensively, βάρβαρος.
The long-resident Hispanic people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado were called manitos by more recent Spanish-speaking immigrants because they (the non-immigrants) called each other manito/a, diminutives of Mexican Spanish mano/a (which I know only from a song lyric, so I can’t swear the feminine was used), short for hermano/a ‘brother, sister’.
I can confirm that the feminine was used, as I’ve heard my mom use it, as in referring to people as “Mana Cuca” or “Mana Lupe” ( or “Mano Pablo” for the masculine.)
Another shortening is nino and nina for padrino and madrina (godfather and godmother.) I don’t know about New Mexico but in California at least we’d use it when speaking English too.
I obediently report that my sister says she often hears the greeting Wie bist du? (a calque from English?), with a /v/ in the first word that’s definitely not the /b/ in the second. She also says that anything is possible, and the people from Lancaster Co., Pa., can’t understand the people from Indiana. Maybe that implies her neighbors can understand both.
On another subject, that “hosey” is the one I heard, and I feel totally sure that it was from a Chicagoan, but maybe he picked it up from New Englanders? In Cleveland we said “I call”. I think I learned “dibs” from The Joys of Yiddish and only later heard it in real life.
@DE: Thanks, that’s an interesting to measure intelligibility, but unfortunate that the results weren’t as good as I might have expected.
…all the language islands of German and Arabic…
(Well, for Upper German it makes sense because there wasn’t an actual voiced [b] already there, so no danger of confusion once you’re used to hearing voice contrasts. The islands in question are also all surrounded by Romance or Slavic, which have robust voice contrasts for plosives. For Arabic this would be an inconvenient megamerger, and to some extent for Central German as well. It’s still interesting how common *[w] > [b] is in Upper German islands when there’s no trace of it in the contiguous area.)
I bet – but anything is indeed possible. Thanks anyway. 🙂
i don’t remember hearing “hosey” as a kid in early 1980s north cambridge, but it sounds like it was already on its way out. and my memory is vague, but i think i know both “i called it” and “dibs” from very early on, though my family also had “i licked it” (or/and licking the thing in question) as a way of staking a claim.
and clearly the term is a reference to the murders of husayn and hasan, through which yazid defended his claim to the caliphate (cf. trinidadian “Hosay”). every day is ‘ashura, in boston as elsewhere.
@Pancho: Thanks, glad to know that.
Cobos does have nina for “godmother” but not nino for “godfather”.
He translates “Mano/a” before a name as “old man/lady”. Was it used for old people in California? On the other hand, he has “Nel, mano” as “No way!” and says, “See also ¡Chale!”
To correct what I said here, the expression it comes from was Nelson le dijo a Wilson. (I wonder whether the Wilson in question is not Woodrow but Henry Lane Wilson, U.S. ambassador to Mexico 1909–1913, recalled after it transpired that he was heavily involved in the coup that killed President Madero, as I just learned from Wikipedia.)
I learned dibs from a Far Side cartoon.
One internet source asserts that the full expression to which Jerry F. adverted is “Nelson le dijo a Wilson:préstame tu llave stilson, y Wilson le dijo nones porque me la descompones,” which google translate Englishes as “Nelson said to Wilson: ‘Lend me your Stilson wrench,’ and Wilson said ‘no, because you’ll break it.'” The details of the deep metaphorical allusion to American policy in Mexico 110+ years ago are left as an exercise for the reader, I suppose. (AmEng just uses “pipe wrench” for the tool commonly called a “llave stilson” in Mexican Spanish; they having remembered Daniel Chapman Stillson (1826-1899) better than we have.)
You could say “Dibs on the pipe wrench” or “I call the pipe wrench” if for some reason you wanted to assert priority of control of that particular tool.* How would you use the “hosey” idiom in a full sentence specifying the pipe wrench?
*ETA: and in my idiolect, at least, it would be perfectly cromulent to combine them as “I call dibs on the pipe wrench.”
in my idiolect, at least, it would be perfectly cromulent to combine them as “I call dibs on the pipe wrench.”
In mine too.
And mine; but I don’t think I would ever say just “I call the pipe wrench.”
I bags the pipe wrench. Hosey is foreign to me, but I’ve read that it is similar a verb.
@JWB. “(AmEng just uses “pipe wrench” for the tool commonly called a “llave stilson” in Mexican Spanish; they having remembered Daniel Chapman Stillson (1826-1899) better than we have.)”
For New York City, I know just Stillson wrench and, informally, Stillson (as in “hand me the Stillson”).
S. v. pipe wrench, Wiktionary says “The Stillson wrench, or Stillson-pattern wrench, is the usual form of pipe wrench, especially in the US.” I’ve never heard Stillson-pattern wrench but of course cannot say that it is absent in American English.
——
@JWB “I call dibs on the pipe wrench.”
For New York City, I know only “Dibs on…” (without “I call” or anything else preceding).
DARE’s examples include “I hosey that seat”, “I hosey the wishbone”, and “I hosey the nibby” (heel of a loaf of bread, c. 1920).
There are apparently even regional differences inside Eastern Massachusetts. My Brighton correspondent (“authentic” Irish Boston) remembers the expression as “high hosey”, which was used the way M. cites people in NYC using “dibs”, without a pronoun or proceding verb. E.g. “hey, high hosey the front seat!”. But my North Shore friend used to say “I hosey” the way DARE records it. Anecdotal discussions on Facebook and Reddit seem to also support the idea that “hi(gh) hosey” was (is?) localised to Boston neighborhoods.
For a different subcategorization, here’s what I wrote in alt.usage.english in 1998:
That’s different enough from my memory that i’m doubting Chicago was involved at all.
The thread also contains a suggestion that hosey had a bit of an [l] in it and might have derived from “hold”, as well as “bogeynize” (Vancouver, BC), and from somewhere in Britain, “`Turn around, touch the ground, bags not on it` – last person to suit the action to the word was `it` in tag..” in case that stirs any nostalgia.
Many websites appear if you search for “high hosey” (which appears to be of Irish origin). These are the first four:
https://www.universalhub.com/glossary/hosie.html
https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2010/10/bags-dibs-shotgun.html
https://www.facebook.com/groups/859140650954255/posts/2295897950611844/
https://www.takeourword.com/Issue100.html
I don’t think I would ever say just “I call the pipe wrench.”
i’m not sure i would either – but “i call pipe wrench” does work for me. i think “call” for me may be about roles rather than objects (an “i call shotgun” paradigm), so “dibs on the pipe wrench” if what’s in question is possession of the tool, but “i call pipe wrench” to claim the unscrewing job (contrasting with, say, “i call sheetrock” for the task of cutting the gypsum board to size).
For those of you on Instagram, I just came across this instance of Polish “dobra”.
@Nachasz,
the miniseries is a more faithful adaptation, yes. But the movie is a wonderful case of “spirit, not letter” adaptation, with better dialogues and Cezary Pazura.
@Jerry Friedman
Cobos does have nina for “godmother” but not nino for “godfather”.
He translates “Mano/a” before a name as “old man/lady”. Was it used for old people in California?
I’ve never heard it used that way in California that I can remember. Over here I’ve heard it as a form of friendly address as in “Hey bro” or “Listen bro” (Oye, mano) and among guys so I don’t remember hearing “mana” in real life but I think I might have actually heard “mana” or “manita” use by female working-class characters in a telenovela though in those cases the characters might have been actual sisters.
I’d have to ask her to be sure but the way my mom used Mana First-Name didn’t imply that she was old but it was the way people spoke to or about each other in those small towns and villages where my mom is from*, especially in my maternal grandparents generation (born in the 1900s and 1910s). I’ve seen this in a collection of Mexican folk tales so it might have been a custom once widespread in rural Mexico or at least in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern US.
For old people it’s always been the honorifics don and doña for both rich or poor. A poor person who is liked and/or respected also often gets the don and doña treatment, often being addressed respectfully as Don First-name or Doña First-name. As far as I know this is widespread among Mexicans. Doñito and doñita are also often used to respectfully address older people one doesn’t know or doesn’t know well in a friendly manner.
*The eastern slopes and valleys of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Durango, Mexico.
Pancho, have you ever met anyone speaking old Californio Spanish?
The plural of no?
(O noes!)
Pancho, have you ever met anyone speaking old Californio Spanish?
I can’t say that I have. There are old California families in and around Santa Barbara ( including ones* with English surnames and blond members who are descended from Yankee sailors who jumped ship and married the daughters of Spanish/Mexican ranchers ) but I don’t remember hearing anyone speak a Spanish that sounded very different but also I don’t think I know what old Californio Spanish sounds like, and if I heard it I think I might think it were an old-fashioned type of Mexican Spanish, possibly. I remember reading a National Geographic article about New Mexico where a Mexican immigrant says something like that the local Hispanics talked like rural people back home.
The Spanish Wikipedia article on Mexican Spanish under the section on archaisms claims that mountain areas of Durango are among the places where archaic expressions persist:
If true then New Mexico or Californio Spanish might sound rather “normal” to me, given that my mom’s side of the family is from a relatively isolated and mountainous area of Durango,** and I myself have at least some of their speech habits, plus the historical ties between Durango, Chihuahua and New Mexico. If you’ve ever read Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop”, the protagonist has to travel down to Durango city first because that diocese originally had jurisdiction over New Mexico.
*and others with Chumash relatives. I remember talking to a member of the local Chumash who told me he was related to a local original Hispanic family and attended some event regarding one of their ancestors. Mexican mestizaje happened in California too.
**also that’s the side of the family is the side I was mainly raised with, rather than my dad’s Mexico City side of the family, so I talk more like a duranguense than I do like a chilango.
The Spanish of mostly indigenous Californians a hundred or so years ago is discussed here. Muncho for mucho and onde for dónde/donde are striking.
There are also a number of recent papers by Lamar Prieto on 19th century California Spanish, here, and especially her dissertation.
Thanks for the links, I’ll check them out later.
I absolutely do say onde for donde/dónde and that’s pretty common among both my duranguense people and among my California Mexican-American peers.
Edited: also, from the example in the abstract from the first link, mételo payá sounds completely natural to me and I’m sure I’ve heard and used it many times.
@Pancho, Regarding mételo payá:
Does the verb in that sentence mean ‘put’? If so, sentences such as mételo en la mesa ‘put it on the table’ and mételo en el suelo ‘put it on the floor’ presumably occur too. Or does it mean ‘insert, put into’ (as in mételo en la caja and mételo en el sobre)? Or does it have both meanings?
Do you not think that the second word in mételo payá could be an anglicism (cf. English put away, as in “put the dishes away in the cupboard”)?
I’m pretty sure payá is simply para allá.
Muncho and onde are typical in New Mexico too. On the subject of archaisms, any takers for jumo for humo, asina (often pronounced [ahina]) for así, lamber for lamer (hence lambe, a flatterer) or vide for vi? A Venezuelan man once told me some rural people in his country say vide.
Of course northern New Mexican Spanish as I’ve heard it also has lots of Mexicanisms including pachuquismos, ese.
@LH. “I’m pretty sure payá is simply para allá.”
Of course payá is a shortening of para allá, but I had the following in mind (and should have expressed it): prepositional phrases such as para acá, para allá ~ payá, para arriba, para abajo, para atrás, and para adelante are used with intransitive verbs of motion (such as ir, venir, correr, saltar, nadar, and remar). The collocation meter para allá ~ payá does not meet those criteria.
But now we see that meter payá does occur, namely, in the lects that Pancho had in mind, and the question of its genesis therefore arises: is it a spontaneous Spanish innovation (not due to the influence of any other language) or was it modeled on “put away”?
@Pancho. “mételo payá sounds completely natural to me and I’m sure I’ve heard and used it many times.”
I do not doubt your word, but your statement refers to synchrony (such a phrase exists) whereas my question refers to diachrony (how did the phrase arise?). Maybe the question is by now unanswerable, but even if it is, it should be asked.
Cf. Pacá.
At DLI Monterey in 1969, one of the instructors was a native Californio. The one feature of his dialect that he pointed out to us was that -illo (etc.) was pronounced identically with -ío (etc.). I don’t know how widespread this is outside Californio. (I don’t mean -iyo, which of course is very widespread indeed.)
A Mexican man, who I traded English lessons for Spanish lessons with, said villa = vía was typical of Spanish speakers born in the U.S., including but not limited to Hispanic northern New Mexicans, though I happened to mention it to some of my students and one bilingual student said it wasn’t true of him.
Or more generally on “put in(to)”, “put up” and other “put” + direction phrases.
@Y. “Cf. Pacá.” Of course that shortening of para acá exists and I could have mentioned it in the first paragraph of my post of 10:58 AM, but the question I am asking has nothing to do with phonology (para acá ~ pacá and para allá ~ payá illustrate, as you know, syncope). See my two questions of 5:31 am.
@M: While looking for old examples of para allá (which you could do too), I found the following, which I’m quoting only because it made my head hurt.
–A letter from the Duke of Alba to Ruy Gómez de Silva (1516–1573). The sic was a relief. A modernized snippet at Google Books seems to suggest that some question marks are missing.
@M
What is for you so different about metelo para allá and traer el culo para allá? Or would the second phrase sound unusual to you?
Ok, I think I see it now. Meter is for you about position (English at), where traer is about destination (English to). But you can also put something to someone, so this distinction is not respected fully in English, also look to/toward v. look at.
I’ll try again to express myself clearly:
@LH. “I’m pretty sure payá is simply para allá.”
Of course payá is a shortening of para allá, but I had the following in mind (and should have expressed the thought earlier):
In the overwhelming majority of latter-day Spanish lects, the verbs poner ‘put, place’ and meter ‘put into, insert’ are distinguished, so that “pon el libro en la mesa,” for example, means ‘put the book on the table’ whereas “mete la llave en la cerradura” means ‘put ~ insert the key into the lock’ and the two verbs are not interchangeable here. That distinction, let it also be said, is not the brainchild of prescriptivists but the result of objective observations by descriptivists.
In the overwhelming majority of latter-day Spanish lects, prepositional phrases such as para acá, para allá ~ payá, para arriba, para abajo, para atrás, and para adelante collocate with verbs of motion (such as ir ‘go’, venir ‘come’, correr ‘run’, and saltar ‘jump’).
The collocation meter para allá ~ payá is thus doubly unusual to someone acquainted only with usage in “the overwhelming majority….”
I am all for recognizing the existence of meter para allá ~ payá but I would like to know what it means.
The phrase Pancho quoted is from the first page of Anderton’s paper, which is the first link in my comment. I assume she refers to a phrase she saw, recorded in the early 20th century from people whose first language was a native language, their second was California Spanish, and who evidently did not speak much English. That argues against the sense of meter having been influenced by English contact.
From the little I checked, meter means ‘to place’ (without the ‘into’ sense) in Aragonese and Galician, and I presume in some varieties of what may be called Iberian Spanish, which made their way to the Americas as well.
Some people here can likely give a much better answer than mine.
@M,
Sorry, I’m not ignoring your questions. I’m just currently overwhelmed with Real Life Stuff. I’ll try to answer some of then as best as I can later tonight or tomorrow.
@Y. For some reason your first link is dead when I click it from my computer, but no matter — because what you say (“recorded in the early 20th century from people whose first language was a native language, their second was California Spanish, and who evidently did not speak much English”) is enough to convince me that at least the prepositional phrase payallá ~ payá in the collocation meter payallá ~ payá is not due to English influence.
With respect to the verb meter, it would be good to know the meaning of the entire verbal phrase meter payallá ~ payá and then I might be able to say something.