On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 03:41:51PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:04:36 -0700, Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> said:
>
> > *) English common usage (rather than formal usage) is rapidly and
> > widely adopting "singular they" (much like a lot of the country uses
> > "y'all", or "you all" for those who don't want to sound Southern,
> > for a second person plural). This may be offensive to purists, but
> > frankly, purists shouldn't be speaking English in the first
> > place. It's a terrible language for purity. :)
>
> A nit: y'all is singular. "all y'all" is plural. Notherners
> often get this wrong.
>
> manoj
This is depedant on regional (sub-?) dialect. In general, the use
of "y'all" as singular and "all'y'all" as plural is associated with
"backwoods" southern US speech patterns, and is less commonly found in the
more urban areas, or the more northern areas of "the South".
I know of nowhere, offhand, north of the Mason-Dixon line or west of the
Mississippi that uses "all'y'all", but the use of "y'all" as a second
person plural can be found in most of the rest of the US, as far as I can
tell (certainly I've personally heard it used in every section I've been
to, which covers just about everything but the Pacific Northwest and the
Deep South - but "y'all" is more common in the parts of the Carolinas I
lived in).
They may exist, but they don't seem to be the rule.
(And for the record, I'm not a Northerner; it's worse, I'm one of those
damned Texans, who can't speak the same as *anyone* else in the US ...)
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
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