New York 7

Listen to New York 7, a 60-year-old man from the south Bronx and Harlem, New York City, New York, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 60

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 07/09/1940

PLACE OF BIRTH: New York City (Harlem)

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Jewish

OCCUPATION: financial consultant

EDUCATION: master’s degree in economics

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject was living in Chicago, Illinois, at the time of this recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Alexandra Goodman

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 15/10/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born in New York City, um, actually North Harlem, but spent almost my entire formative years in the south Bronx, and we actually lived between Yankee stadium and the Polo Grounds. Now I realize that most of you who will listen to this tape will have no idea what the Polo Grounds were. The Polo Grounds were a field, an athletic field, a professional-athletic field where the New York football Giants and the New York baseball Giants played. Living between these two stadiums was fabulous because that meant that any day that I didn’t feel like going to school, which amounted to many days, especially during the football and baseball seasons, I had a choice of either going to watch the Yankees Baseball team, the Yankees Football team, the Giants Baseball team or the Giants Football team, in person. Now back in those days, I know you won’t believe this, but back in those days, you could actually go to the ball park about the sixth inning and the turnstiles would be left unattended. So that means that you could get up to the general admission turnstiles; there would be nobody there to watch; you could sneak under, over or around these turnstiles, get into the ball park and watch the last three or four innings of most every game.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Eric Armstrong

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

Note the following features: a light Bronx/Jewish dialect; no R-coloring on -er endings and on -OR -OOR, as in “cure, north, formative, before”; strong R on -AIR, as in  “Sarah, Perry, Square, rare”; stressed ER vowels with R-coloring (begins with sound in “hut”), as in “earlier, were”; strong rounding (and a slight offglide) on the AW vowel, as in “football, baseball, long, cloth, cost, Bronx”; final Schwa NOT like “hut,” as in “Comma” (resists intrusive R); Polo (almost sounds like Polar); -eye diphthong very bright (begins with ash), as in “Giants”; Ash before Double R, as in “Harrison”; Yod Dropping, as in “tune”; and lots of pitch variation, as in “Five or six times the cost of penicillin.” Also note that the sound quality abruptly changes in the last sentence.

COMMENTARY BY: Eric Armstrong

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
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