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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

#111

Post by mark-r »

tokenadult wrote: post #53

Thanks for the submission. This is an interesting article about applied linguistics for primary education in the United States. Approximately around 1900, the United States reached its peak period of receiving immigrants who were not English-speaking when they arrived. Today, nearly all Americans speak one variety or another of English, even though only about one-fourth of the United States population consists of per…

The article makes it very clear - AAVE is superficially the same as General American English so neither the teachers or the students realize that that the kids need to speak two different languages. Instead you have the teachers insisting that there's only one language and they're using it incorrectly. That's quite a bit different from the German and Norwegian your grandparents had to deal with.

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

#112

Post by blocking_io »

anigbrowl wrote: post #108
blocking_io wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you read French? As the article explains, the structure is identical. There is no ambiguity.

You obviously didn't make it to the end of the article, where it's explained that numerous Francophones wrote into dispute the author's interpretation and the author admitted his understanding of French was fundamentally flawed. As a French-speaker myself, encountering obvious bullshit at the beginning of the article made it difficult to uncritically accept his assertions for the remaining pages.

It was a little strong of me to say that the structures are identical. They are comparable.

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

#114

Post by blocking_io »

[deleted] wrote: post #113

[deleted]

Can you point out where in the article it advocates teaching students AAVE?

Rebecca Wheeler, the professor at Christopher Newport University mentioned at the outset, is a descriptivist, like all linguists. She says that these kids are speaking AAVE because that’s what they know; it’s not wrong — it’s their language. She thus advocates teaching students who speak AAVE at home the concept of code-switching. The general idea is simply the notion of switching between two different languages as needed.

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

#115

Post by hackinthebochs »

Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #106
blocking_io wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You're wrong. Linguists have been studying AAVE for years. It has been determined how the grammar of AAVE differs from SAE. All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker…

"You're wrong. Linguists have been studying AAVE for years. " Yeah but I didn't say Linguists wouldn't be able concoct a grammar for AAVE, I said one AAVE speaker would not be able to point out the grammatical errors of another. The sentence I gave was an example of AAEV from the article. The article used the sentence "I ain’t tell nobody nothing about no sushi". I just gave a bunch of other examples I thought would…

>I said one AAVE speaker would not be able to point out the grammatical errors of another.

Would you be able to point out the grammatical errors in standard english without having been taught standard english grammar all through school, while at the same time having it re-enforced through writing assignments, literature, etc? I don't know about you, but I very likely would not. The point is we don't have a built in mechanism to flag subtle grammar errors (although we can certainly tell if something "sounds" wrong, but this is likely through re-enforcement).

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

#117

Post by pasquinelli »

Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #70
blocking_io wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

"All are bad English, i have no doubt whatsoever, that all would be understood by a speaker of "AAVE""

but they'd all be perfectly well understood by a speaker of "english" as well. so then "english" isn't a language. fascinating stuff.

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

#118

Post by pothibo »

agscala wrote: post #91
pothibo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I ain’t never eat no sushi." Does this means you 'will never eat sushi?'

No, it means "I've never eaten sushi"

Good to know, I don't know why, but it has a ring to it that made me believe it was future tense.

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

#119

Post by derleth »

blocking_io wrote: post #110
smsm42 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your righteous indignation does not really contribute much. There are billions of people that speak bad English every day. That alone doesn't make their English good. Just saying "a lot of people do it" is not a validation of anything. Every person with native Russian language, at least until they lived in English-speaking country for many years, reliably skips articles and reliably misuses complex tenses, because th…

Your comparison of second language speakers to native speakers of AAVE continues to be insulting and wrong. I'm not sure what you mean by "superior" here. There's an English language with its grammar rules, and there are common mistakes or detachments from widespread usage patterns which people make in English. This is wrong. There is not 'an English language'. There is Standard American English, Scouse, Glaswegian,…

> this article does not advocate AAVE speakers should not be taught SAE

If he actually understood this, his righteous indignation would be gone and then where would he be?

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

#120

Post by prodigal_erik »

blocking_io wrote: post #83
smsm42 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how it follows. For example, for a native speaker of a language that has no definite/indefinite articles, it is common to omit those in English. Also, for speakers of languages without plural or complex tense system, it is common to systematically omit plurals or use only one or two tenses in English. Would it mean that English without articles, plurals and with only present tense would not be a "bad Engl…

Are you really comparing how second language learners mangle a language to the first language of millions of Americans? As I said, English learners would not consistently apply rules. They make different mistakes. AAVE speakers reliably use the same grammar, and can understand each other unambiguously. Please explain why Standard American English is superior to AAVE. Why do you think SAE is any more valid than AAVE?

> Why do you think SAE is any more valid than AAVE?

Wasn't AAVE originally created by people consciously trying to imitate SAE as best they could after limited education? Don't all the differences represent mistakes now immortalized?

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