What's with so many people using seen instead of saw? Maybe it's just the part of the country I'm in, but I never noticed it much until about 5 years ago. Nothing makes you sound more like an uneducated hillbilly than saying "I seen ____."
Your stuck in a room with only a wooden table and a mirror, but no conceivable way out. What do you do? What. Do. You. Do. You look in the mirror. You seen what you saw. You take the saw and cut the table into two halves. You put both halves of the table together to make a hole. You crawl out of the hole.
Fascinating. If you watch the video, it backs the theory that poor English speaking indentured servants contributed to the speech.
I've always been fascinated by dialects. Probably because my family is a bunch of Yankees and I spoke like them when I was younger and got some funny looks, so had to adjust my vernacular to fit in with the yokels. I grew up in Alvin, and I've noticed a sub-dialect that stretches from Santa Fe (TX) through all of Brazoria County. People will say things like 'and them' when they include a group of people, 'tumped over' when something is knocked over, and when I was a kid, some kids would say 'think (pronounced thank)' instead of imagine or pretend 'think if we were in GI Joe'. There are a few others that don't come to mind right now.
My sister tried to tell me the "have" before seen is understood. I said what is understood is when you say "I seen" you're an idiot.
All of those sound familiar to me and I grew up around Gunspoint in north Houston. So you can expand the geographic reach of your sub-dialect. The one that always got me (because my friend across the street would say it while I would not) is when he's use "look at" in place of "watch". Like, "What show you lookin' at?" Still not completely sure if that's dialect or him being a dumb-ass.
"tumped [over]" is absolutely a Hill Country thing, and I never knew until right now that people thought it was weird. "think if" as you describe it is a substitute for "what if". "Think if we'd done that...where'd we be now?"
I said it recently and my wife looked at me and said ‘wtf did you just say?’ I had to google it and prove it was a colloquialism.
