Pittsburghese Expertise: Dropping “To Be” | Hacker News Reader

Pittsburghese Expertise: Dropping “To Be”

theglassblock.com

68 pointssuperchink58 comments

My wife talks this way all the time, and when we were first dating it really bothered me. Eventually I came across an explanation of the regional-ness of it on the internet somewhere, and I asked her if any of her family is from the Pittsburgh area. As far as she knows, they aren't, but they are from Columbus, OH, which is just down the highway a bit.

I heard that Pittsburgh-ians also tend to use "yinz" for the second-person plural, which I find much better than a plain "you," and much, much better than "You all" or "y'all". (Though I'm now told it is not as commonly used as I assumed it was)

Anyway, I love reading about the various ways american english has diverged, given time and distance.

It's "y'all", a contraction of "you all", not "ya'll". Which makes infinitely more sense than "yinz" which is apparently derived from "you ones" or something like that?

I also find that 'dropping of to be' sounds completely unnatural to me. It sounds like something I'd expect a non-native speaker to say.

My personal favorite English change is the cot-caught merger.

Of course, all of my preferences make sense because I grew up internationally or in the south - I wasn't caught up in the cot-caught merger and I picked up y'all because there has to be SOME second person plural!

> I picked up y'all because there has to be SOME second person plural!

Same here. Way more elegant solution than "you guys", and less jarring to most people than, say, "youse". The only better solution would be to bring back "thou" for the singular and make "you" plural, but alas, that's unlikely to happen (and I'd be the one using "thou" and "y'all" anyway).

Of course, there are the folks who treat "y'all" as a singular second person pronoun and use "all y'all" for the plural; I've worked with quite a few of those folks.

> Of course, there are the folks who treat "y'all" as a singular second person pronoun and use "all y'all" for the plural; I've worked with quite a few of those folks.

Presumably for the same reason that 'you' migrated from plural to singular in the first place. (Initially as a sign of respect/politeness/formality, then gradually becoming universal.) Perhaps someday we'll see "all y'all all"...

I use y'all for the second person plural and all y'all to when referring to multiple groups. For example: Team A will go to the left, team B will go to the right and then all y'all will charge the center on my mark.

I dig it; it's like "persons" v. "people" v. "peoples".

Yes, this is how I learned it from imps.

I remember reading somewhere that there is a difference in meaning between "y'all" and "all y'all":

1) Do y'all have a ride? 2) Do all y'all have a ride?

In one of them (and I don't recall which definition is which) the meaning is "Do each of you own a car?" and the other one is "Do each of you have a car you can ride in?"

My understanding:

1 = "do all of you have a ride (perhaps shared)?"

2 = "do each of you have your own ride?"

So if Bob, Jim, and Jane are all riding in Bob's car then "y'all have a ride". But if all three of them have their own car, then "all y'all have a ride".

ymmv.

Thanks for pointing out my "y'all" typo -- fixed. I just don't like the way "y'all" rolls off the tongue, and never enjoyed using it. But, as you say, there has to be SOME second person plural. I just like the way "yinz" sounds, I guess. /shrug

Actually, 'you' is the second person plural in English. If you want a singular, you'll need to recover 'thou' from history's dumpster.

It was. Language evolves.

If you want to be different you could always try out the Aussie version.. 'youse'

Oh that's cool, I didn't know it was in use outside Scotland. I'd always pegged yous/youse as a Scots thing

In Ireland, a lot of people people use 'ye' as the second person plural. Mostly in areas outside of Dublin.

In Dublin, the slang variant is either 'yiz' or 'yous'

Yous or youse is the naive synthetic pluralisation of the singular you (in the analytical form both are you).

Another one is "yunz". People don't really use "yinz" and "yunz" too often though :(

Really? That's disappointing. I'm going to edit my post a bit bc apparently I've been misled :-/

Actually, you'll hear plenty of "yinz" in the greater Pittsburgh area, but more often in the outlying rural areas surrounding the city.

Concur. It's not quite as widespread - what I've seen is that even quite a few non-natives tend to adopt "needs washed" after living in the region for long enough, but I don't hear yinz used unconsciously from people not born in the region. But there's plenty of yinz - and the city embraces its yinz-ness.

I always heard it round dahntahn. Norseide and Souside, mostly. In the Nordills, it wasn't as common, but my gramma sed things like worsh and spigot but she grew up dahn Etna an aht.

Goodness that was hard to type.

People will use it jokingly though :)

"Are yunz gonna eat lunch n'at?"

My home town takes a lot of its accent from Baltimore, though it's still over two hours away. I never got used to saying "you'ns". There is a definite glottal stop in the middle. Annoying.

"Yinz" is equivalent to "yous" - which is supposedly a Philadelphia thing - but everyone up in Erie prefers it to "yinz."

"Yinz" is very, very localized.

FWIW, I was raised in Cincinnati and spent almost a decade in Columbus, and "needs fooed" sounds perfectly normal to me, too.

Yinz is more flexible. Like it is used to address a singular person: "hey, yinz" or a group: "what are yinz guys doing?"

It's much more of a novelty until you hear it a lot, and then you start to hate it. "Yinz guys" sounds particularly offensive to my ear for some reason

i like the. aussi's yous

I said "<jira ticket> needs deployed" when answering a question the other day at work and the person had to explain why that sentence is not valid.

I grew up about an hour away from Pittsburgh and work/live in Pittsburgh now... what's funny is that Pittsburghese is more prominent just outside of the city.

Whenever we were adding HTTP error codes to part of the IE F12 tools, I translated many of the strings from the IETF spec to our formatting, dropping "to be" at every possible case (as a yinzer naturally might). My poor content publisher rejected the draft, circling every grammatical issue and likely wondered if I really had a grasp on the English language. I wondered the same after seeing that much red cross out.

It's tough being a Pittsburgher :-)

It's perfectly valid. It's just a non-standard construction. ...for American English I'll add.

It's regional: http://microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/needs-washed

The article mentions that 'In some parts of England, you’d hear people use a phrase on the model of verbing: “The wine needs opening.”'

Is 'needs verbing' really that uncommon? 'Needs fixing' seems like a very common expression that fits that pattern. I guess the article might be trying to say that in some areas of England 'needs verbing' is the default form but I'm still a bit confused by that sentence.

It really depends on the tense. I'm from Texas and "needs fixing" sounds completely normal (although it sounds even more natural as "needs fixin'"), while "needs fixed" is awkward as heck.

-ing is interchangeable here in Australia with to be -ed

e.g. "the roses need pruning" vs "the roses need to be pruned"

Yet there's a formality typical in passive aggressive notes of using the 'to be -ed' syntax. Further, one only need apply 'to be' once with several actions

"dishes need to be washed, dried and put away".

Maybe -ed emphasizes the completed state vs continuous -ing focusing on the event of doing the action. e.g. opening sparkling wine with a popping cork is part of the occasion.

The idea of needs verbed being nonstandard is entirely new to me, and I live on the opposite side of the country from Pittsburgh, as has most (all, AFAIK) of my family. It feels right for things in my day-to-day work, like "the server needs rebooted" or "the bug needs fixed", though for other things, like "the code needs compiling", the needs verbing form feels more natural.

Interesting! Can you see any pattern distinguishing the verbs where the -ing complement form sounds more natural vs the -ed?

> In fact, it’s possible that you are just now learning, from this article, that needs verbed isn’t the way everybody says it.

I am from Columbus but moved to NYC awhile back. I am just realizing that at some point I switched from "needs washed" to "needs to be washed" and never even realized it.

I'm from Western Pennsylvania - an hour North of Pittsburgh - and can confirm.

Interestingly, I've unconsciously learned that "to be" sounds proper, and have been code switching most of my life without even realizing it.

It's just a case of re-using the past tense for the gerund instead of using the present participle tense.

Also, shouldn't the correct collective noun be Pittsburgher not Pittsburghese? The name Pitt and the noun Burgh are both Germanic not Romance.

The dialect is Pittsburghese, not the people. Pittsburgher or Yinzer is the singular demonym.

And the burgh in Pittsburgh is Scots, not Germanic. For twenty years, they even dropped the h from the end.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_Pittsburgh

Scots is a North Germanic language with a smattering of West Germanic vocabulary; as opposed to English which is a North Germanic language with a large amount of West Germanic and French vocabulary). A fair number of scholars regard both English and Scots to belong to the West Germanic branch, but in my estimation the grammar of English and Scots is closer to languages like Nynorsk or older forms of Danish (which is where the Angles and Saxons came from). Vocabulary tends to be more flexible and adaptable, via loan words and the like, than grammar.

You're right; the -er suffix is a reference to a person or thing in Germanic languages, my mistake. It should be Pittsburghisch or probably more likely Pittsburghish.

Of course this is nothing more than my humble opinion; opinions like farts etc...

I discovered this thanks to a chance encounter on Duolingo (which is based in Pittsburgh, coincidentally). This commenter is from my small hometown in western Pennsylvania, and I in fact knew her in real life: https://www.duolingo.com/comment/236814$from_email=comment&c...

So according to the article, Pittsburghers and Western Pennsylvanians contstuct it the way those in England do. Huh, we speak Queen's English n'at.

To me (Central European/Czech), this sounds like Russians speaking English: IIRC, in Russian, the verb "to be" is mostly implied (resulting in sentences seemingly without a verb), which they carry over when speaking other languages ("Hello, I here. My car needs fixed.").

If anyone is interested in a humorous - yet frighteningly accurate - depiction of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia speech, watch the "Pawnsylvania" sketches from Kroll Show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qeY0mIn1K0

It's not dropping "to be", it's using a different participle. It's kind of like substituting "vaccinated" for "vaccinating".

"To be or not to be" would still sound exactly the same

I've been doing this lately. But only because I can't stand my phone's keyboard. Actually, if I'm not writing professionally or for public consumption, I do far more egregiously 'fun' things with my writing to make it more touch-screen friendly:

Convenience:

probably -> prolly

__ing -> __n

__ed -> __d

I'm -> I

and -> n

something -> summat

Purposeful misspellings:

your -> yoor

maybe -> mebes

work -> werk

word -> werd

programming -> porkgramn

morning -> mern

And randomly drop unneeded words.

"The car needs washd, prolly do next fri mebes if I not busy porkgramn summat fo werk."

"Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding." [0]

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2013/01/28

It's hard to really jump on that line of thought without more information. Plenty of misunderstanding occurs because people make unwarranted assumptions about what some words have been employed to mean on the basis of familiarity alone. I know a few people who seem to communicate entirely in terms of cultural signals, propaganda, platitudes, and slogans. This is the easiest stuff to understand, but it also doesn't offer anything novel.

If I'm going to say something mundane, I see no harm in asking someone to play a game to understand it. Even if you've failed to understand, there's no real consequence for it.

Pittsburghers' heads need examined.

As a side note, the OP's username "superchink" seems pretty offensive to Asians on Hacker News.

...which is also his email, which is also the username of the only person who wrote a definition for that word at urbandictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=superchink) ...yeah.

Yeah. Actually, I didn't write that definition, as amusing as it may be. I don't consider my username to be suited for Urban Dictionary, since it doesn't qualify as slang.

Forgive us for not thinking your name was all about the vinasco super chink. http://www.applog.com/webstore-products/vimasco-super

I wonder if people consider that product offensive as well…

Your comment seems offensive to people that don't like passive aggressive political correctness.

I'm sorry you found it offensive.

It's sort of a relic from my childhood. I don't get a whole lot of negative reactions to it; most appreciate the humor.

But you're certainly entitled to be offended and I am sorry to hear about it. It was not my intent.

Is it offensive to you?

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