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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

#131

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pacaro wrote: post #42
brown9-2 wrote: post #25

This is only barely related, but I read something a few weeks ago that I think those interested in this topic would also find interesting: A few years ago, researchers discovered that schoolchildren in Baltimore had invented a new gender-neutral singular pronoun : http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx

An interesting article, thank you. "Yo" seems to feel more natural than the usual Spivak options. I was mildly amused at the "pause/unpause" word pair mentioned in the article, I had always assumed that the pair was "pause/resume"...

I'd say there are "pause/unpause" and "pause/resume". The former details that resuming is by releasing the pause state, eg repeatedly pressing on a pause button. For "pause/resume" the resumption can be achieved by pressing play, for example, rather than by unpausing.

It's analogous to "mute/unmute" and "mute/resume[sound]" where the unmute is by pressing the "mute" button, ie releaseing the mute state, whilst the resumption of sound can be achieved by pressing a volume up or down button.

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

#132

Post by Cushman »

smsm42 wrote: post #92
nollidge wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differences between American Standard English and AAVE are primarily grammatical, not lexicographical. So an AmE-AAVE dictionary wouldn't be very thick. And Leetspeak, txt-speak, and AAVE are not equivalent entities. Leetspeak is an alternative alphabet, txt-speak is a system of abbreviations and slang, and AAVE is at minimum a dialect.

Leetspeak can be classified as a dialect too, if you'd like, it has its own words (leet, pwnd, haxor, etc.) and you can find grammar differences if you look hard enough[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet#Grammar

That's pretty unconvincing. Despite the heading "Grammar", it mentions differences that are lexicographic or merely orthographic in nature. The only real grammatical process mentioned is "changing its grammatical usage to be deliberately incorrect" which has some obvious problems. "All your ___ are belong to ___" is an idiomatic expression in Internet Standard English, but that does not a grammar rule make.

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

#133

Post by theorique »

pothibo wrote: post #118
agscala wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be "ain't never gonna eat no sushi".

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

#134

Post by cpsales »

JoelSutherland wrote: post #40
Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job. I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it…

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…

Shizzle mah nizzle fo rizzle.

The problem with AAVE is that as much as some academics try to imprint it with French grammar history or specific qualities of a major language, it is too easily corrupted with non-standard pidgin fads even within its everyday usage. A lot of it is emotive slang that can mean a myriad of things without supporting context clues in regular English. Specific pronouns often refer to unconventional nouns so that it becomes an inside joke. Haphazardly juxtaposing SOV/SVO word order and verbing nouns does not a ginuwine phat language roll.

Honestly, it's closer to an alternate form of English poetry than a separate language.

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

#136

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Hairy_Sandwich wrote: post #26
tomku wrote: post #17

I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools, but at the same time, I strongly feel that this kind of split is exactly what leads to less diversity and more segregation in the long run. In an ideal world, we'd all be neutral about which dialect we hear and speak whichever we're more used to ourselves. In the real world, it just gives people another data point by which to divide the rest of their world…

>I can understand the argument for supporting AAVE in schools I can't. Schools are supposed to teach you the official language and all the skills you need to succeed in society. AAVE won't help you (or be useful) at work, or in academia, unless you are studying AAVE as your job. I agree that it will be divisive in the long run, I think you are right that encouraging AAVE to continue and legitimizing it and calling it…

> Was the cockney English slang of 1800's England a language?

I thought the posh Queen's English was a relatively recent invention (1818)? Your argument is kind of rediculous.

Anyways, is a Shanghainese uneducated because they speek Shanghainese at home rather than the standard Beijing-ish dialect?

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

#137

Post by sdqali »

nsns wrote: post #60
hkarthik wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty true in India, which is divided into states mostly by linguistic lines. I've heard "dialects" which sound distinct enough to be separate languages (Marwari versus Hindi) and "languages" that sound similar enough to be dialects (Urdu and Hindi).

"Hindi" is made up of Marwari, Mewati, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Bundeli, awadhi, chhattisgarhi... all of them different language with their own history and literature. This was done in '47 mostly for political reasons, to stop Bangla from becoming the Indian national language. In a way the Italian situation is similar [0]. [0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Italian_l...

I would like to point out that linguistically there is no language called Hindi. The modern Hindi is a Sankritized, modernized register of the Hindustani language - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language

I am not sure if somebody amalgamated all those languages to form Hindi in 1947. The original article 343 of the Indian constitution specified Hindi in Devnagri as the national language, mostly out of the insistence of people like Gopal Krishna Goghale who while agreeing that English is a better language for law-making (http://www.constitution.org/cons/india/p17348.html) argued that we should not declare it the national language because of the colonial past.

The Official Languages Act of 1963 and subsequent amendments to article 343 cleaned up this mess.

Edit: Clarified the correct article of the constitution. I originally said Article XVII, but it should have been Part XVII.

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

#138

Post by seanmcdirmid »

blocking_io wrote: post #127
prodigal_erik wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Why is the origin relevant? Middle English incorporated Norman vocabulary into Old English following the invasion and subjugation of England. Does that make French a more valid language than English?

> Does that make French a more valid language than English?

The French might think so...

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

#139

Post by greggman »

auctiontheory wrote: post #129
greggman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cultures consider non standard dialects just that, "non standard". They don't deride people who speak them as poor or less educated. For example consider Japan. Nearly every region in Japan has its own dialect. Everyone learns, for lack of a better way to say it, "standard Japanese" which is the kind used by news broadcasters. But, to their friends and family in their hometown they speak their local dialect whic…

I think that "is the culture that speaks AAVE a valid culture?" is a vanishingly insignificant question compared to the critical real-life problem of providing black inner-city kids the education and communication skills necessary to make it in today's world. If you graduate from high school speaking only AAVE, you are in big trouble. Students need to learn to speak standard English, whatever else they may or may not…

Agree with your first point.

The article is not suggesting teaching AAVE. The article is suggesting not deriding people who speak AAVE at home, teaching them the difference between AAVE and "standard English", why it's important to know the difference, and when it's appropriate to use one vs the other.

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

#140

Post by kscaldef »

auctiontheory wrote: post #129
greggman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some cultures consider non standard dialects just that, "non standard". They don't deride people who speak them as poor or less educated. For example consider Japan. Nearly every region in Japan has its own dialect. Everyone learns, for lack of a better way to say it, "standard Japanese" which is the kind used by news broadcasters. But, to their friends and family in their hometown they speak their local dialect whic…

I think that "is the culture that speaks AAVE a valid culture?" is a vanishingly insignificant question compared to the critical real-life problem of providing black inner-city kids the education and communication skills necessary to make it in today's world. If you graduate from high school speaking only AAVE, you are in big trouble. Students need to learn to speak standard English, whatever else they may or may not…

You're arguing against a strawman. The article states that no one is suggesting that students not learn Standard American English. The point it is making is that it is more useful in teaching SAE to recognize that some students arrive at school speaking a different dialect rather than with an incorrect understanding of SAE, and that acknowledging that explicitly is more productive than telling them never to speak their home language.
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