Welcome back, Kotter
Looky, y’all. Blake is back.
Completely unrelated but which spelling is correct: Ya’ll or Y’all?
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
January 12th, 2005 at 9:05 am
I once had a discussion over the y’all thing in an English class.
We came to this decision.
Use “Ya’ll” if you’re addressing one person. The assumption is that you’re contracting you will, even though you’d never say: You will gonna like this. You would say “Ya’ll are gonna like this.”
Y’all if you’re addressing many people. Contracting You All.
January 12th, 2005 at 9:08 am
It’s a contration of “you all.” The apostrophe replaces the missing letters, just as in “don’t” for “do not.”
Thus, “y’all.”
January 12th, 2005 at 9:12 am
y’all
January 12th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
BST: It’s not a contraction of “you will” (I’ve never heard a southerner pronounce “you” as “ya” or “will” as “wall”) but of “you all”. “You” was originally plural, but the singular form (if there ever was one) was lost long ago, so it’s long been used for the singular too. “Y’all” is an attempt to correct that vocabulary deficiency by creating a definitely plural form.
Us Yankees ought to adopt it instead of making fun of it…
January 12th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
I did a post on this a while back. Enter “y’all” in the Blogger search box to find it.
It’s most definitely “y’all.” I think the confusion comes from some Northern pronunciations of “you” as “ya.” By their lights, it’s the “all” that’s smooshed into the contraction.
Damn Yankees…. 😉
January 12th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
Next up, the subtle differences between “y’all” and “ALL y’all.”
January 12th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Next up after that….
How a cracker pronounces ALL vs. OIL
January 13th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Hey MarkM,
It’s an incorrect pronunciation of the contraction you’ll….
What more, it’s a fake, incorrect word. I’ll say it contracts “Blow Me,” If I want to…
January 14th, 2005 at 3:01 am
The spelling is “y’all” under all curcumstances. It is one of several regional attempts at clarifying a plural “you”, being a contraction of “you all”. Probably the next most common is “you guys”, or, more colorfully, “youse guys”.
Anyone who uses “y’all” in the singular (where “you” does just fine) is wrong, and probably has no experience with the word other than in SNL sketches.
Anyone who thinks that it is a contraction of “you will” is even more wrong, and probably only has experience with the word through sneering penniless intellectuals.
(It’s vaguely possible that some Yankee would contract “ya will” in a way that sounds similar to the Southern “y’all”, but I’ve never heard it in regular use, and it wouldn’t be the same word at all, merely a homophone.)
Mike and markm, above, are right.
For spelling, see also:
http://mountaineermusings.com/index.php?p=843
January 14th, 2005 at 3:04 am
…and before anyone gets smart, I know quite well how to spell “circumstances”. Anyone with a qwerty keyboard will know what went wrong.