201–210 of 262 posts
I grew up using expressions that might fall under the umbrella of Ebonics. However, I tend to avoid using them in work settings. Friends who are also black have shared anecdotes about employers sounding put-off during phone interviews. Until this bias is addressed, young people should be aware that speaking Ebonics can have negative professional consequences.
I know its not a mother tongue but a tiny part of me thought this was going to be about Perl.
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.
Wow, I'm a bit disappointed in the HN community here. There are a lot of idées reçues [1] that seem to come up over and over again (anti-homeopathy being one, not that I'm pro-homeopathy, so don't get off-topic over it). But this whole anti-Ebonics is new to me (in this community), especially after the OP explained it in such understandable terms. Secondly, the whole interpretation of "double negatives" as being logi…
No, this doesn't fit: Being opposed to homeopathy isn't an "automatic thought or platitude" and it certainly isn't "self-contradictory". It's an acknowledgement of basic science. Grouping it in with the kinds of thoughts "idées reçues" was intended to refer to makes the term entirely meaningless.
And, since we're talking about language, this is entirely on-topic. ;)
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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.
To be fair, people who speak ebonics do not want to sound 'white'. So both sides are doing this on purpose.
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Wow, I believe that was an overtly bigoted comment. So there is no legal commerce conducted in 'ebonics'? I had no idea when I was a kid that all those people making grocery purchases at the corner store were engaging in illegal activities.
It was an observation and clearly not a rule, same could be said for other dialects like Cockney in England.
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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 sla…
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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…
Seriously, you are equating AAVE with Spanish. AAVE is how people of poorer means speak or with less education speak, even if it's not politically correct to say it. Spanish is an actual language hundreds of years old and spoken by multiple nations. By your logic you might as well recognize English slang as an actual language. -Edit: So for those arguing that AAVE is a dialect, then If I add a few rules to any other…
Nope: take, for example, the "axe" pronunciation of "ask." You can trace this usage in an unbroken line from AAVE to Southern American English to Modern English to Middle English to Old English. You see, it's not just synthesis that can create a dialect or language, but also retention.
By your argument, Modern English isn't much of a language either. Instead, it's just the result of hundreds of unskilled speakers through the trajectory from Old English to Middle English to Early Modern English not learning how to properly use cases and inserting foreign Latinate words because they couldn't speak OE properly.
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> determination of dialect/language difference is mostly political I heard that expressed as " A language is a dialect with an army and navy " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an... I found it quite true when you look at cases like Dutch vs. Afrikaans or Swedish vs Norwegian vs Danish. Declaring your dialect a "language" can be a tool of nationalism.
As counterexample I would still call American English and Brazilian Portuguese dialects, even though they have armies and navies. I'm not sure if I would call Afrikaans a dialect.
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It was an observation and clearly not a rule, same could be said for other dialects like Cockney in England.
A correct observation, one supported by evidence, is that using the dialect correlates with being poor. Making the jump from that to "illegal commerce" was all you, and that was bigoted, especially since AAVE is strongly associated with African-Americans.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/08/24/dea.ebonics/index.html
So I disagree it wasn't "all me" and it wasn't bigoted.
I grew up using expressions that might fall under the umbrella of Ebonics. However, I tend to avoid using them in work settings. Friends who are also black have shared anecdotes about employers sounding put-off during phone interviews. Until this bias is addressed, young people should be aware that speaking Ebonics can have negative professional consequences.
So can having a black name or black skin. It is a bug in our society, and acting white is a workaround, not a fix.