Y writes to alert me to this series of tweets by linguist Neil Alexander Walker:
My father speaks Everglades Southern English, & I grew up hearing /ˈædiˌɡɑɡən/ to mean ‘out of kilter’. He just used this word to define what’s to him an obscure dialect word used by his NC-born grandmother: /ˈjijeɪ/. My Q: does anyone know how these words are spelled English?
His maternal grandparents were born in NC in the 1890s & moved to FL in the ’20s. His maternal grandmother, specifically, said /ˈjijeɪ/ & she had other dialectal peculiarities, including /z/ for /s/ in /zɪŋk/ ‘sink’ (& supposedly other words, though he cannot remember which ones)
We have not reconstructed the family line in full, but where we have, all of the NC side seem to go back to the founding of that colony or Virginia before that, so, most likely, the speaker born in the 1890s would not have had an immigrant ancestor more recently than 1700-1750.
Y adds: “These are still fresh as of now (9/8/2024), and he has not yet had a reply. I cursorily tried DARE and ADD, but couldn’t come up with anything. Any ideas?” I join him in his question and direct it to the assembled Hattery.
I’m wondering whether “gagen” and “jijei” have some connection with “gauge” (English) or “gaugen” (Old French). Just an idea.
To be clear, /ˈjijeɪ/ represents something that could be written YEE-yay.
Is “Everglades Southern English” non-rhotic? Otherwise, I can’t think of how to explain -ɡɑ-. Maybe <gau>?
Wouldn’t that be a fairly normal way of transcribing something rhyming with “toboggan” in US English?
First one reminds me of Appalachian “sigogglin.”
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sigogglin
Ah!
The likely answer was linked in the entry:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/antigoglin
Ding Ding Ding!
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thesaurus:askew has “antigoglin”, but the closest match to /ˈjijeɪ/ is “agley”
Don’t have access, but I think this is it
https://www.daredictionary.com/view/dare/ID_00064205?language=en
It’s on their survey for words meaning askew
https://dare.wisc.edu/surveys/survey-results/1965-1970/manner-of-action-or-being/kk70/
Dusty, you solved three mysteries for me! The two from the post, and then the question of what Y meant by trying DARE and ADD. I thought that meant trying to use different vowel sounds in the original words but had no idea why that would be helpful or relevant. Your reference to the Dictionary of American Regional English cleared that up.
Is ADD the American Dialect Dictionary or something?
I meant EDD. I blame ADHD.
So either Walker’s GGM used “yee-yayed” for “yee-yawed”, or his father remembered it inaccurately. Likewise, either his father drops the [l] from “antigoglin”, or Walker didn’t hear or didn’t remember it.
You people are amazing.
Y: The DARE survey has hee-haw, squee-haw, gee-haw, gee-ho-hawed, skew-hawed, screw-hawed, whee-hawed and whee-whaw, (the last of which I feel like I’ve heard).
So I’d venture the word doesn’t have just one stable form.
I meant EDD. I blame ADHD.
What does ADHD have to do with a WNBA star?
Yee-yawed in Maine, 1901 and 1922.
Perhaps someone with a Twitter account can alert Walker.
You people are amazing.
I’ll say.
Perhaps someone with a Twitter account can alert Walker.
Done. I hope I didn’t miss someone else having done it already. I think it was my second ex-Twitter post.
OED has antigodlin and antigoslin, too. And skygodlin and siebegodlin.
Re: sink, Isn’t voicing of initial fricatives a West Country thing?
In Confederacy of Dunces, Mrs. Reilly says at one point, “I wanna go wrench out my glass in the zink.”
Could it just be an eggcorn, cf zinc “countertop”?
Avram Davidson wrote a short story called `Goslin Day’, but I don’t have a copy and don’t remember it well; perhaps someone else will? [This is a shot in the dark.]
From here:
More details here. It seems to have first appeared in Orbit 6, where I presumably read it in 1970.
I agree with your second link: There’s nothing slight or hard to perceive about the unease in “Goslin Day”. And on the original subject, I don’t think “antigoslin” has anything to do with that Yiddish word.
I’m sure it doesn’t, but it’s always good to see an Avram Davidson reference. (I have to be careful when I venture into the area where my sf books and magazines reside, because I can easily pick something up, get sucked in, and not emerge into the real world until dinnertime.)
[…] because I can easily pick something up, get sucked in, and not emerge into the real world
As Julio Cortázar proved so many times, emerging into the real world can often seem like a sci-fi episode.
Not even a minute ago, I saw Cortázar mentioned alongside Alejo Carpentier, whose The Lost Steps I just bought in the new translation by Adrian Nathan West (Kindle edition on sale today for $1.99, if anyone else is interested): synchronicity!
I recall the story (aside from its avramitude) because I once tried to check if `goslin’ was somehow Yiddish (and failed). It may have been his own invention, cf `The house the Blakeneyes built’? Ahee…
It’s apparently YIVO gazlen, which this dictionary defines as “robber, bandit; vicious person”. Maybe the changeling part is Davidson’s invention.
@mollymooly: Could it just be an eggcorn, cf zinc “countertop”?
A nice idea, but eggcorns usually purport to explain a less familiar word in terms of more familiar ones, and to me, zinc is definitely the more obscure one.
@ Jerry Friedman, thanks!
גאַזלען / gazlen makes sense to me! i’ve never encountered it used for a spirit or creature, but i could imagine it turning up that way somewhere, or just coming to davidson’s mind. to expand on refoyl’s definition, a gazlen is a thief-by-violence, as opposed to a גנבֿ/ ganef, who is a thief-by-stealth. there’s a fantastic verse from a ballad on bronya sakina’s repertoire:
az a gazlen koylet a mentshn
koylet er im mit a meser
du host mikh gekoylet ober nisht nor derkoylet
bist fun a gazlen nokh greser
when a robber kills a person
he kills him with a knife
you’ve killed me, but not to death*
you, compared to a robber, are the greater
.
* i don’t think there’s a way to do in english what the song does with the converb here, since we don’t have either them or a completative mood/declension to draw on.
Stealthy violence?
Re: sink, Isn’t voicing of initial fricatives a West Country thing? – Adam
They be my thoughts, too, Adam. UK Zomerzet, Devon etc.