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A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

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Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#61

Post by dsfasfasf »

DannoHung wrote: post #57

Theory: AAVE doesn't get respect because the vocabulary size in most AAVE corpuses is smaller than common English corpuses.

No, it does not get respect because that is how people from a lower socioeconomic level speak. And if you come from a higher socioeconomic level you might not want to speak like that so as not to be confused from the lower socioeconomic level because it can kill off many opportunities in the work place or love relationships. Unfair? maybe, but this is how the real world works.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#62

Post by calibraxis »

freehunter wrote: post #20
HarryHirsch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair comment to say that AAVE is spoken by people of low socioeconomic status, and that is why anyone speaking it carries a stigma. The keyword is "code switching".

That's true, but it's not fair to say that this is the language of criminals. There's two different issues at play. Speakers with a southern accent aren't all uneducated good ole boys, even though the stigma says just that. Speakers of Russian are not all in the Mafia. It's disingenuous to say that the language is only used by criminals, and labeling it as such only reinforces that.

Such racist comments have a twisted relation to the truth: the US virtually criminalizes its Black population. It's public knowledge that no other country incarcerates its people as much. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...)

Any honest person can see that those of us with more "respectable" US accents form the real criminal culture. We took the land from people we exterminated, took slaves of people whose dialects we still ridicule, and to this day imprison and war like no other humans in the universe.

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#63

Post by ezy »

eroded wrote: post #32
jinushaun wrote: post #11

I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics, I don't understand the resistance to double negatives in "proper" English. The "ain't got none" construct exists in many other languages. The double negative reinforces each other, instead of canceling each other out.

As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.

This is the problem with being a "programmer" with no domain. This is sort of like the one true programming language debate ("blub") where people want to evaluate mathematical notation as to their qualitative worth completely devoid of any context.

Computer languages are not spoken languages. No one should accuse English of being "illogical" because it's redundant. It isn't as terse as mathematical notation because most people don't speak completely in mathematical notation. And it's all very logical, actually -- just not in the way you might expect. You might want to look into the effects of redundancy on transmission errors in communications before you pass judgement. :-)

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#65

Post by smsm42 »

eroded wrote: post #32
jinushaun wrote: post #11

I think ebonics if a load of crock, but as an aficionado of linguistics, I don't understand the resistance to double negatives in "proper" English. The "ain't got none" construct exists in many other languages. The double negative reinforces each other, instead of canceling each other out.

As a programmer, double negatives make me reel with horror. I cannot parse an English sentence with a double negative as being a single negative; it's utterly illogical. At best, they're an unnecessary hindrance.

Only English language is logical, it's known. I mean, just look at the spelling...

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#67

Post by akavi »

twelvechairs wrote: post #33
Jun8 wrote: post #15

When my Historical Linguistics professor mentioned that determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I was amazed and argued with him for half an hour and still wasn't convinced after that. I thought there should be a way wherein a linguist can collect and then analyze corpora, then scientifically discover and label dialects, isoglosses, languages, etc. Later, I learned that although there are too…

As the famous saying goes "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

Which was said first, ironically, in Yiddish (a language that gains its status as such through its connection with an ethnic group, not military presence).

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#68

Post by joshrotenberg »

gchpaco wrote: post #38
spolsky wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific name for this is actually 'code switching' ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching )

Code switching is actually when you wander between two or more languages in the scope of a single conversation (which is downright weird to listen to if you speak only one; girl I knew would wander between Russian and English conversing with her mother and I would try like the devil to follow when she started in Russian and eventually realize that it wasn't some weird English words). Based on my own (small) experienc…

Spanglish is an interesting example of this, and I hear it quite a bit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanglish

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#69

Post by smsm42 »

JoelSutherland wrote: post #40
Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job. I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it…

I don't think you read the article. "Schools should recognize the legitimacy of AAVE as a language for their students, and teach those students to recognize when and how to switch between AAVE and American English as appropriate. But most schools don’t do that. They simply teach students that the way they speak is wrong. Don’t talk this way; talk our way. Wheeler says we’re still not doing right by children who grow…

So should there be AAVE-English academic dictionaries with entries like "ain't: are not", etc.? What about l33tsp34k and txtng spk, u wnt 2gt dctnrz 4 it 2?

Re: A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect

#70

Post by Hairy_Sandwich »

blocking_io wrote: post #49
Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job. I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it…

As the article points out, if it were 'bad English', the rules of AAVE would not be consistently applied. However, speakers know how to use the rules and they always apply them. Saying that 'calling it a language' is bad is truly ignorant. As far as linguists are concerned, it is a language. If you say otherwise, you are simply wrong. There is nothing inherently better about the English you speak compared to their En…

I don't think there are any rules to "AAVE" either, one speaker of this dialect? creole? language? or whatever we're calling it, would not be able to point out grammatical errors in the speech of another. I think the following would all be considered valid AAVE:

I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody about no sushi. or I didn’t tell nobody about sushi.

All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker of "AAVE". I am of the opinion there is no such thing as AAVE, but there is definitely such a thing as people speaking bad English, which is reinforced by peer pressure and cultural and historical factors. Also I feel like people (educators in Oakland?) just caved, and don't want to admit that they have failed to properly educate and include a huge swathe of people.

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