Word: dialectics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...daughter of Italian immigrants, she belongs to the state's largest ethnic group. Her husband Tom, a retired principal, is also an Italian American. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Mount Hoiyoke, Grasso speaks the language of the classroom as easily as she does the Piedmont dialect of Italy on the front porch...
...title, translated from its rendering in an Italian regional dialect, means "I Remember." The movie finds Fellini once again back in his boyhood, in the same place-Rimini, a small seaside town-and in rather the same mood as in his earlier masterwork, I Vitelloni (1952). The film's framework is a full year in this small town, from the coming of one spring to another, although the true time of all events seems to be rooted in Fellini's imagination. The look of clothes, the political talk and the movies people go to see fix the period...
...retired professor of educational administration at Long Island's Hofstra University, who has made a hobby of studying the format of Brooklynese for some four decades. Says Griffith, the holder of a doctoral degree in speech education from Columbia University: "Brooklynites have all but lost their special dialect, the badge of their tribe...
...many characteristics, but its hallmark is the pronunciation of the diphthong er as if it were oi (like Joisey for Jersey) and vice versa. Some linguists believe that Brooklynese stems from German and Yiddish. Griffith argues forcefully that it is rooted in Gaelic. He notes that the dialect appeared after a wave of Irish immigrants settled in Brooklyn in the late 19th century. Moreover, Griffith finds that the trademark Brooklyn diphthong oi also appears in many Gaelic words; taoiseach (leader) and barbaroi (barbarians), for example. He also points out that the th sound is absent in both Gaelic and Brooklynese...
Even Griffith, who spent many years as a Brooklyn teacher, once placed a sign above his blackboard admonishing: "There's no joy in Jersey." But Griffith takes no pride in having helped put the kibosh on the dialect. "Brooklynese had a bluntness and homeliness," he says. "There is a real joy in variety. Now we're becoming phonetically homogeneous." And that, as they used to say in Brooklyn, is for da boids...