Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 February 23
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February 23 edit
Done edit
I occasionally hear "done" acting as, well, I suppose it's an intensifier: "Mama done chase Willy down through the hall" (I'm not sure if it's "chase" or "chased"; Google lyrics has it as "chase", but I've always heard it the other way). Is it simply an intensifier or is there more to this? What dialects make use of it? To my ears, it sounds a bit like baby talk, though I guess that's because it sounds grammatically incorrect to me. Matt Deres (talk) 21:06, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
- This seems pretty accurate. It's mainly a Black English and Southern English thing. (Note the epigraph in the linked article for a classic instance in song.) Deor (talk) 22:58, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
- "My mama done told me", as sung by Daffy (and Porky, for a brief moment) in My Favorite Duck. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:59, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
- That Yale page is excellent. We do mention this tense/aspect marker within the AAVE article (and we and Yale share a major source, Lisa J. Green, African American English: A linguistic introduction), but we don't describe it anywhere near as well. -- Hoary (talk) 00:55, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Being pedantic, I think Deor meant Southern American English, Southern English is somewhat different. Alansplodge (talk) 09:11, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- That Yale page is excellent. We do mention this tense/aspect marker within the AAVE article (and we and Yale share a major source, Lisa J. Green, African American English: A linguistic introduction), but we don't describe it anywhere near as well. -- Hoary (talk) 00:55, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- Thank you for the perspectives, particularly that Yale link. Interestingly, the writers of Little Willy (the song I used in my example) were from London and Nambour, Queensland, neither of which could be described as anywhere close to the southern US, so I suppose this is an example of affecting a southern American accent, which was not uncommon among British groups in the 60s and 70s. Matt Deres (talk) 13:11, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
- More recently you may hear this in the meme phrase "you done goofed". Adam Bishop (talk) 20:16, 24 February 2019 (UTC)