November 28th, 2014, 7:42 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: Traden4AlphaQuoteOriginally posted by: CactusMan--"you'll" (but people avoid this because it sounds very cockney)Technically this is a the contraction for "you will", not a plural second person pronoun.the contraction of "you all" is "y'all" which is in meriam-webstery'all come back now, ya hearfrom elsewhereQuoteBut where did ?y?all? come from in the first place? A fews years back, historian David Parker explored this question on his blog. For an answer he looked to linguist Michael Montgomery: ?Montgomery claims that ?y?all? goes back to the Scots-Irish phrase ?ye aw,? and he offers as evidence a letter written in 1737 by an Irish immigrant in New York to a friend back home: ?Now I beg of ye aw to come over here.? As I understand Montgomery?s hypothesis, ?ye aw? was Americanized into ?y?all,? which is indeed a contraction of ?you all? but would not have come into being without the influence of the Scots-Irish phrase.I see little reason for doubting Montgomery?s hypothesis. But I dug a little deeper to see where ?ye aw? itself comes from. Turns out I didn?t need to look far: a quick Google search of ?ye aw? brings up numerous examples of this phrase being used in contemporary Scots. (Scots is a language spoken in much of Scotland which derives from middle-English. It influences, but is separate from, contemporary Scottish English.) This language was brought to Northern Ireland by Scottish planters, then brought to America by ?Scots-Irish? immigrants.