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Slaughtering of English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Deshwi Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 5599 days ago 31 posts - 38 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Arabic (Written), Turkish, Hindi, Persian | Message 33 of 37 01 January 2010 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I've read this thread and ones like it and they make me laugh/cringe. I wonder why people even bring things like this up. Calling it 'ugly', 'wrong' or 'bad' does nothing more than irritate people. I know if someone told me that the way I speak is 'ugly' I'd be offended. If you don't like Black English, then I would suggest you don't learn it.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 37 01 January 2010 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I am saying that this way of speaking exists because of the slave trade almost 200 years ago. This way of speaking would not have existed had the slave trade not existed. I fail to see how the fact that people speak this way today can be anything but a direct consequence of the slave trade.
To suggest that what I say is an "affront" to anyone is to suggest that there is something wrong with this way of speaking; which is itself an even greater affront to those who do speak this way.
"Slang" is a pejorative term.
Many cases of language death have been supported by prominent members from within the community. Some Scottish Enlightenment scholars opposed the use of Gaelic and Scots as "barbaric" and talked of how it limited the potential and future opportunities of the youth of the day. Even today, there are some native speakers who refuse to pass on the languages to their children, and they do this for their children's "potential and future opportunities". In Wales and Ireland, where the languages have been used as flags for nationalism, there were many who spoke of English as the language of advancement and of the future. In India, some gurus tell couples only to speak English and watch English language TV in the home, for the sake of their children's "potential and future development". The world over, people are abandoning their own languages for the sake of some promised "potential and future development".
The difference here is critical mass -- most immigrants are a minority in their area, while the imported slave population was a big enough body to form a self-supporting language community. But not only a language community -- they created a new culture. People were deliberately and purposefully separated from members of their tribes or speakers of similar languages so that they would have no common culture or tongue other than that of their masters. Advancement should not come through loss of one's own culture, and does not have to. Everyone here knows that bilingualism is more than possible. Expecting people to learn Standard US English is all well and good, but that's not exactly what this thread is talking about -- if bilingualism is possible, a single person can speak both Standard US English and AAVE/Ebonics. Criticising Ebonics as being in some way limiting is a total fallacy.
Well first of all we're talking about Modern English, not Old English. Putting that to one side, I've never heard any rule that states a creole cannot made out of two or more members of a single family.... Edited by OldAccountBroke on 01 January 2010 at 11:21pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| ChiaBrain Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5807 days ago 402 posts - 512 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: Portuguese, Italian, French Studies: German | Message 35 of 37 02 January 2010 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I think this thread has been blown way out of proprotion but I am not surprised.
Its very easy to see any form of speech that is close to our own but modified as a corruption of the original and therefore "wrong". Especially if it is not officially recognized as a separate lanugage. We get bad grades in school for not producing speech that is "correct". When I started studying Portuguese I had a hard time not seeing it as a corruption of Spanish. It seemed as if many Spanish words were shortened and sounds blended into dipthongs. Did I automatically become a bigot for having this perception? Ultimately for language to work there has to be rules. People have to speak it the same or similar enough for meanings to be transmitted and they get frustrated when they percieve that someone has changed the rules on them arbitrarily. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| unityandoutside Diglot Groupie United States Joined 6013 days ago 94 posts - 149 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: Latin, Mandarin | Message 36 of 37 02 January 2010 at 7:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
AAVE doesn't contain any African words. As for would-be gangstas, what they are speaking is most definitely AAVE, and what you describe as "messing up" English is in fact speech based on a different, but equally consistent, set of rules. Grammars have been published on the subject. You may be surprised to note that AAVE has a richer system for verbal aspect than standard English -- calling this form of speech a mere degradation of standard English does it a great injustice. If you're interested in learning about AAVE, the wikipedia article on the subject would be a good place to start. For the record, I do agree that the majority of mainstream rappers out there are boastful and offensive. However, I don't think it's fair to judge a dialect (or whatever you prefer to think of AAVE as) based on the fact that you don't like the attitude of some of its speakers. Someone talking in such a fashion in standard English would also be repulsive, but that's no reason to make remarks about standard English itself being repulsive. I personally find AAVE spoken by an articulate speaker to be flavorful and interesting, and where I live I have heard plenty of AAVE -- both repulsive and beautiful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 37 04 January 2010 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I think it is time to close this thread before it gets even more political and polemical.
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