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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

#101

Post by meepmorp »

drivers99 wrote: post #90
eroded wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A double negative is not double negation (in other languages), it's called agreement[1]. Just like you have to have agreement between numbers in English (It is / They are) you can also have languages that require/support agreement in terms of negative/positive. Yes, it's redundant information, but all human languages have a lot of extra information built into them at every level to make them easier to use. [1] http:/…

My intuition is that double negation in English is usually accompanied by a shift in stress to emphasize that the negation should be interpreted in the "correct" way (i.e., as negating a previous negation) rather than as mere agreement. I think English actually allows multiple negation with no significant change in semantics in many dialects, possibly as the default interpretation.

Be interesting to do a corpus study on this.

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

#102

Post by hawkharris »

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.

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

#103

Post by nollidge »

anigbrowl wrote: post #89
nollidge wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think AAVE is simply modern America's cockney slang. Well, what linguists think is that it's at minimum a dialect with consistent grammar and using features of many other forms of communciation that you'd probably consider "real" languages. Just because it's not what you were taught doesn't mean it's "bad" English or slang.

Cockney slang has rules too, it's at least as much a dialect as AAVE.

True! I was more objecting to the "I think" part and the "slang" part, but I should've been clearer about that.

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

#106

Post by Hairy_Sandwich »

blocking_io wrote: post #86
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…

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 pass for actual AAVE sentences, that would be "grammatically correct" intelligible to any AAEV speaker.

I'm of the opinion that it's merely wishful thinking to say that we can tell where simple bad English ends and AAEV begins.

Just because you suggest that I'm probably a racist because I remain skeptical about AAEV being an actual language, that doesn't make it a language. I think that the AAEV is simply result of PC politics. Nobody not even linguists are immune to politics. I haven't "insulted the speakers" in any way, I didn't say people who talk that way are stupid, I said that people talk that way because they are uneducated, or because of peer pressure, or historical/cultural factors.

"Did you read the article? It explains that by acknowledging AAVE as the native language of students, educators are better able to teach SAE and explain to students in what context it should be used."

Yes I read the article, that doesn't mean I agree with everything it said. If AAEV truly is a language then I'll come around eventually with the right explanation. If I never hear a persuasive enough explanation then I won't come around to that way of thinking (recognizing AAEV as a language). Suggesting that people are racist for not seeing how it is a legitimate language, only makes me more beleive that it's politics and not linguistics that gave it that classification.

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

#107

Post by notahacker »

wildwood wrote: post #46
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.

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...

In this case, those attempting to standardize English grammar decided double negation should be used to achieve subtle shades of positive (as in Italian) rather than negative emphasis (as in Catalan) so double negatives are not conveying nothing (unlike in French or Castilian where the standard extra negative no comunica nada). Perhaps the divergence between the Romance languages is more immediately surprising...

What's interesting is that normal use of negation seems to have changed over time within many individual languages, repeatedly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle which is perhaps part of the reason why the AAVE double negative has so many parallels in British regional dialects and the writings of Chaucer

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

#108

Post by anigbrowl »

blocking_io wrote: post #55
eroded wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#109

Post by Jun8 »

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…

"There are, alas, social disadvantages in the United States from having nonstandard speech patterns"

This is, of course, true not only in the US but in many other countries and often popularized in plays, movies, etc., Eliza Doolittle. In German, where people are quite possessive of their regional dialects, Bayerisch speakers are sometimes derided.

And it's not just nonstandard speech patterns, either. Unique names that flag people to a certain minority group may also bring social disadvantages. This is generally the case with the tradition of inventive/unique names among African-Americas (http://www.salon.com/2008/08/25/creative_black_names/ or see the paper at http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v119y2004i3p767-805.html).

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

#110

Post by blocking_io »

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…

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, Received Pronunciation, Jamaican English, AAVE, and dozens of others, many of which you would find harder to comprehend than AAVE.

What would be the reason some of these should be institutionalized with four-letter acronyms and research programs and, I have no doubt, juicy grants?

As I keep explaining, this article does not advocate AAVE speakers should not be taught SAE, but that by recognising their native language they can be taught SAE better.

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