A mother tongue spoken by millions of Americans still gets no respect • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by losvedir » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 12:41 PM UTC

Evbn wrote: post #195

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…

Watch The Wire, through at least Season 1. Those guys ain't dumb. Most of the AAVE speakers are villains, though.

Ah, what a good idea! Thanks.

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

#232

Post by mpyne » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 1:48 PM UTC

smallegan wrote: post #169

mpyne wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the nicest, hardest-working, and most experienced people I've had the pleasure of working with in my current job speak AAVE. Don't let your preconceptions cloud your judgment as to the validity of a language.

This was ONLY a comment on what I think it takes for a language to grab hold and not a comment on the people who speak it.

Despite the strident tone, I never said otherwise. My defense of the language is based on the people I've encountered who speak it.

It's like, I personally don't like rap, but I wouldn't begrudge others who do because they see something special in it that I simply don't see. I used to, until I realized it wasn't simply that people were being "stupid" by listening to rap, but instead that I was missing what they were seeing.

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

#233

Post by nollidge » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 2:30 PM UTC

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?

My uneducated 4-year-old nephew speaks American Standard English. It doesn't take any education whatsoever to imitate language.

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

#234

Post by nollidge » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

smsm42 wrote: post #99

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?

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…

> Just saying "a lot of people do it" is not a validation of anything.

Actually, when it comes to linguistics, it's the only thing that validates it. Can you possibly come up with better criteria?

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

#235

Post by nollidge » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 2:47 PM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #98

Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #70

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. 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…

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. I'm inclined to agree. I live in north Oakland, in a pat of the city where a lot of the Black Panthers were based and got involved in community development on a practical level, such as installing traffic lights on dangerous intersections and suchlike. A fe…

> it clearly is not a fully developed language

Says who? Your intuition?

> the parallel drawn with French was simply incorrect

If you'd actually read that part carefully, you'd notice that the specifics of the example were incorrect, but even the correction is still a valid double-negative in French.

> if you're not teaching English effectively

As has been repeated several times throughout this thread, the argument was never about changing the English teaching curriculum. It was about having the teachers learn AAVE so they understand their students.

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

#236

Post by Cushman » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 2:57 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #223

Cushman wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not pointless, see my other reply:

> If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.

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

#237

Post by eridius » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 4:53 PM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #236

eridius wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not pointless, see my other reply: > If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of Engl…

How is it factually false? Standard english has in fact changed since Shakespeare's time. The link that derleth gave documents this fact.

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

#238

Post by Cushman » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 5:14 PM UTC

eridius wrote: post #237

Cushman wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pointless, see my other reply: > If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of Engl…

How is it factually false? Standard english has in fact changed since Shakespeare's time. The link that derleth gave documents this fact.

The point of this entire thread is that what you are calling "standard English" is not a thing. It's not what Shakespeare spoke and it's not what we speak. There is American Standard, the dialect primarily spoken on the news in the US and elsewhere, but that is one of dozens. Many of those, including the Elizabethan spoken by Shakespeare and ethnolects spoken my many millions of people today, employ double negatives for emphasis. You are trying to draw an old/new distinction which does not reflect reality.

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

#239

Post by Afton » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 7:29 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #190

Afton wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not downvoting you. But your position is untenable, and comes from a misunderstanding about what a language is. It's not that it's not politically correct, it's that it's factually incorrect. No one is arguing that there is or isn't a class and racial component to who speakers of AAVE are. They are primarily black and poor. But that point is irrelevant. Kids raised where people speak AAVE will grow up speaking AA…

Simply declaring that it is a language gets you nothing too. If every minor variation creates a whole new language, then almost no two people with a vocabulary of a few thousand words actually speak 'the same language'.

Sure, and if you want to go down the road of constructing metrics for language, you can. I should warn you that you will likely find it fruitless and arbitrary.

Your point about how every variation makes a language is correct. The term is idiolect. Language (like 'English'), is an abstraction over idiolects. But getting people who want to argue about "correct English" to an understanding of idiolects is more work than I can put into a comment during a work day. I'll try and dig up a general description of the issue and link it here.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect#Idiolect_and_language is the best I could do on short notice.

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

#240

Post by 205guy » Wed, Apr 03, 2013, 9:03 PM UTC

derleth wrote: post #203

205guy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> idées reçues [snip] anti-homeopathy 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. ;)

You proved my point: needing to counter homeopathy every single time it (or something vaguely similar, such as anti-vax--and yes, that is bait) is mentioned off-hand is automatic thought. I didn't bring up homeopathy with arguments for or against, I brought it up as an example of what happens to discussions, I discouraged people from discussing the merits of it, yet you still do.

A good translation of "idées reçues" would be "a mild case of groupthink" (while recognizing that homoeopathy itself is a product of more serious groupthink). It's not a judgement about the content but an observation about the behavior I see on HN. I think it's totally possible to have automatic thoughts that are scientifically sound, but they can still be automatic (or "idées reçues") if they come more from unanalyzed peer statements and wanting to fit in than from self-driven analysis.