Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

the-magazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 262 posts

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

#221

Post by dlib »

dyno12345 wrote: post #170
Daishiman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans self-identify with English just as much as Brazilians identify themselves with Portuguese. This issue arises when this is not the case.

I can think examples of any combination of "has army/not", "is language/dialect". Mutual intelligibility doesn't even matter either way. has army, is dialect: Schweizerdeutch, American English, Brazilian Portuguese has army, is language: Norwegian (v. Danish) no army, is language: Yiddish, Afrikaans no army, is dialect: Frisian

Frisian is an official language recognized by the Dutch government and the EU, in fact it is one of the two official languages of the Netherlands. It is taught in schools and spoken at official policy meetings.

Nonetheless, your point still stands as I'm sure there are valid examples of 'no army, is dialect'

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

#222

Post by unhammer »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #120
blocking_io wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wasn't Modern English originally created by speakers of Old English consciously trying to imitate French as best they could after limited education?

(Wasn't Old English originally created by Anglo-Saxons consciously trying to imitate Norse and Latin as best they could after limited education?)

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

#223

Post by eridius »

Cushman wrote: post #162
eridius wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "modern English", not "Modern English". The fact that Wikipedia defines a term "Modern English" to mean English spoken since ~1550 is quite irrelevant to this discussion.

Wikipedia, referencing the science of linguistics. And it ain't a scare capital, they call it Modern because it is. English spoken since the Great Vowel Shift does not differ from English spoken today any more than dialects of English spoken today differ from each other. If you want to claim that Shakespeare did not speak modern English, capitalized or non, you will need to specify exactly what you think you mean, be…

The entire context of this discussion is a concrete example of how the language spoken by Shakespeare does in fact differ from the standard English spoken today. But instead of recognizing this fact, you are trying to turn this argument into one over the meaning of the term "modern english", which is completely pointless.

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

#224

Post by unhammer »

mattsfrey wrote: post #37

I think that it isn't well regarded as a language because at root it is simply an adaption of another language (English). There's differing vernaculars anywhere you go, depending on the culture and the demographic. There's no use in regarding them each individually as "languages", they are termed correctly as just being vernaculars. When I started working at a factory when I was 18, I was suddenly bombarded with blue…

> I certainly wouldn't advocate that becoming a nationally recognized language.

The US has no official language, so it's a moot point. The article talks about how _teachers_ should recognize the language. Not teach the language, recognize it as a language, and not assume you're dumb just because you grew up speaking a different language (assumption like that have a definite negative effect on student performance).

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

#225

Post by unhammer »

hrktb wrote: post #93
wildwood wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some research[1] that suggests that some dialects of Old English used double negation reliably, but that this got phased out in 'proper' Middle English. It's interesting that double negation is standard in French, but not used in Germanic languages. In this case, it seems like the Germanic influences on English won. [1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2006-11-08/features/06110...

Double negatives are recommended in proper french, but using only the first negation is actually grammatically correct(ex: je ne sais pas -> je ne sais) and keeping the second negation only is usual in casual speak (Je ne sais pas -> Je sais pas). I always thought double negatives were a waste of time and ink, but come to think of it this kind of redundancy seems optimized for quick parsing. There is more effort on t…

I thinks person marking on verbs and use of articles is waste, who needs? Also, "have seen" is redundant because of "have", "have see" is better. Also, "is" redundant, many language does without. Without better.

Language is full of redundancy. Because it's a constantly evolving, very complex system of rules, it never reaches a state in which every grammatical sentence has an optimal balance between economy and expressiveness.

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

#226

Post by unhammer »

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.

That note at the end also made it clear that the mistakes were corrected. Did you read the first part, get upset, then reload and read the note at the end?

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

#227

Post by [deleted] »

Evbn wrote: post #206
calibraxis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note this is the same fallacious thinking and biased observation that believes gay == flamboyant/effeminate, southern US == stupid, suit == powerful, etc.

[deleted]

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

#228

Post by calibraxis »

Evbn wrote: post #206
calibraxis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Note this is the same fallacious thinking and biased observation that believes gay == flamboyant/effeminate, southern US == stupid, suit == powerful, etc.

Perhaps I misunderstand your point, but members of those groups don't have a real say in what the others do. They don't coordinate in a coherent policy. In contrast, my US culture does have a formal political system, where I do have a say in its decisionmaking. So we share some responsibility for its violence.

That decisionmaking power is less than in a real democracy (a top-down republic with some democratic forms), but more than a dictatorship. So there's some shared responsibility which does not exist in your examples of other groups.

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

#229

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dyno12345 wrote: post #73
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the key point is that no-one is being marked incorrect at school or told they are stupid etc. for using American spellings instead of "correct" British English spellings (or other language features). Probably the war of independence between the countries marking an important boundary for when those things changed.

My mother-in-law apologizes for accidentally using "slang" terms in front of my children, mostly because she was taught at school that her language was 'incorrect' and it was suppressed in favour of the 'correct' dialect of the ruling class who lived in another country.

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

#230

Post by losvedir »

omonra wrote: post #193
losvedir wrote: post #175

Excellent article, uncharacteristically poor HN comments. I only learned about AAVE in the last few years and it was eye opening. I realized I do have a sort of instinctual prejudice against it, though. From the article: Many of us unfairly judge others based on how they speak. Kenneth the page, on the late, great 30 Rock, spoke with a southern accent meant to exemplify his yokel-ness. Maybe you think that British ac…

Could you share with us "videos of articulate, smart, (preferably math/science-based discussion in AAVE)"? Perhaps this is the missing link for us sceptics - we associate it with poor uneducated individuals. Ie - by definition, if someone whose primary language was AAVE wants to sound articulate and smart they will resort to SE?

Well, that's just it. A native-AAVE speaker will use SE when speaking to me, even if their preferred dialect at home is AAVE, so I don't get exposed to it. Think of this reporter [0].

However, I'm sure he's an intelligent men, and I'm sure when speaking informally he'll fall back to AAVE. What I'd love to see is someone at, say, PhD Math or Physics level speaking in AAVE, preferably about that subject.

I'm studying a bit of Arabic, and I see parallels. In Arabic, there's the formal register, called Modern Standard Arabic. This is the dialect used in the Quran and printed in newspapers and such. However, people don't routinely speak in this register -- they speak in their local Gulf or Levantine or Egyptian dialects, which are pretty different from each other and from MSA. The pronunciation of letters is different, the vocabulary is different, hell, in Egyptian the question word goes at the end of the sentence whereas in other dialects it goes at the beginning.

They, too, think of their local dialects as "wrong" or "beneath" MSA, even though it's the native tongue of themselves and everyone around them, and they have to study for years to be comfortable with this somewhat artificial MSA dialect.

It's not quite as regimented in English, because the dialects are more similar, and because no one natively speaks the formal register, but the principles are the same.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti1dHabjH3k [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ3dk6KAvQM&t=4m31s

Post reply on HN