Word: dialects
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...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...
INEXPERIENCED acting and awkward staging account for the rough spots in the production. The English accents pronounced by some of the younger actors waver a bit indecisively before settling on region and dialect. Occasionally failing to pay attention to one another, the players time some of their remarks poorly. And though the audience surrounds the stage on only three sides with the bulk of the spectators in front of the stage, altogether too many of the characters' movements are directed to the back of the set, as if the play were being performed in the round. The actors often manage...
...score of cases while representing the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund before the Supreme Court prior to 1962, but now finds himself in the Burger Court's liberal minority. The court's best raconteur, who sometimes likes to jive groups of whites by lapsing ostentatiously into a broad black dialect. Has collected an informal panel of law professors and judges to help choose his clerks, who as a result are now usually the best in the building. Still impatient with legal complexities, preferring to go to the right or wrong of a situation as he sees it. Another activist who will...
...have an entire nation that has been submerged into believing it is inferior," says Author Robert Shirley, 46, of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University. Recalls Hugh MacDiarmid, the country's greatest living poet: "When I was in school, you were punished if you lapsed into the Scots dialect. You were never taught much more about your own country than, of course, what a great thing it was to have been handed over to the greater glory of England...