Blacks can't speak English - Bill Cosby

by closer2fine 129 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Cassiline

  Anyways it's all about the person. The only people that I have seen that actually try and make something of themselves have been around white kids for a good portion of time. Sad really... Lol it's already 10 times harder for a black kid to get to college and most of them act lazier than white stoner kids.

  Obviously Secret

  That is wholly UNCALLED FOR and utterly F*$##@#D It's when I read this I am ashamed to be a part of the human race.

  Cassi, leaving now so I don't loose my temper any more.
• 

  Crazy151drinker

  So Wrong, but so funny:

  I have to go to the book store so I can buy some books and study=

  I gots ta jet ta da book swapmeet so I can gank some books an' study peep this shit
• 

  Leolaia

  Basicly, a certain uneducated people have HORRIBLE language skills and you are trying to legitimise it by saying its "a dialect"

  I think you need to educate yourself about about linguistics and particularly about the nature of dialects and Black Vernacular. Insisting it's not a dialect doesn't make it not a dialect. Sorry.

  http://www.joel.net/EBONICS/translator.asp

  Do you seriously think a for-fun webpage with a "translator" labelled "Ebonify dis whack English" is gonna pay any attention to the actual grammatical rules of Black Vernacular? I hope you're not that gullible.

  Linguists have been studying the structure of Black Vernacular for nearly 40 years. There are scores and scores of articles and books that describe and analyze its phonology and grammar. Pointing to a goofy webpage as proof that what has been well-documented does not exist is ... goofy.

  But I am speaking purely in scientific terms that Black Vernacular definitely is linguistically and structurally a dialect

  Then it would be the same everywhere and its not.

  This logically does not follow. EVERY language and dialect has internal variation. No language is uniform everywhere. But variation is not chaotic but can be predicted and analyzed by social, language-internal, and situational factors. Black Vernacular however is more uniform over a greater geographical area than most dialects because it was spread relatively recently (post-WWII) over a wide area. Bill Labov has studied this in detail.
• 

  Leolaia

  Answers to some Questions about "Ebonics"

  (African American English)

  Prof. Peter L. Patrick

  University of Essex

  [email protected]

  Why "Ebonics" is a language:

  A language is a coherent system of signs - a grammar of elements and rules - which is used in a regular way for purposes of communication, and also for social symbolic purposes (such as making clear to listeners a speaker's identity, how they feel about themselves and others, and how they perceive a situation). African American Vernacular English, or AAVE - which is sometimes called "Ebonics", but not usually by linguists - does all these things and more, in ways just like other languages do.

  So, it's a language.

  Why AAVE [="Ebonics"] isn't a separate language, but a dialect of English:

  Most of the time when people question whether AAVE is a language, they mean, Is it a separate system from English? in the way that German, Chinese, or Jamaican Creole are separate systems. In this sense, a dialect is a complete system that overlaps to a great degree with some other, super-system. Thus Bavarian German is a dialect of German-in-general (but it's not a dialect of Swiss German); London English is a dialect of English, and U.S.A. "Broadcast Standard" English is also a dialect of English.

  AAVE, too, is an English dialect. Most of its components in the dimensions of grammar, lexicon, and pronunciation are widely shared with English - either with standard American English, or with Southern White English, or with vernacular dialects of English around the world. So it's not as separate as German, Chinese or Jamaican Creole, which all have very different grammars and lexicons, and which are all unintelligible to monolingual speakers of American Englishes. On the other hand, AAVE does have its own distinctive features and functions. It can be spoken badly, or imitated inaccurately, by whites (or blacks) unfamiliar with its rules; and it symbolizes community and cultural values for its speakers that no other dialect of English in the world can convey.

  Is AAVE [="Ebonics"] slang?

  Ebonics is not slang. Slang refers to a relatively small set of vocabulary items which are ephemeral - they gain and lose currency rapidly, go in and out of style. Slang does not have a grammar or rules of pronunciation; it is not a dialect or a language. Like other terms which have technical definitions for linguists (such as "dialect", "patois" and "pidgin"), "slang" is often used by non-linguists - not in the way I have just described, but rather to mean "a way of talking that I personally look down on".

  Is AAVE a "made-up" language?

  All languages are "made up" by their speakers, in a way, but this does not happen in a single generation. (Some linguists believe that it does, for pidgins and creole languages. But in my opinion - and this is my special area of study - this is not true in any meaningful sense for them, either.)

  To say that a language is "made-up" tends to imply that it is "not real" in some important way - not as good as languages whose existence is undeniable. Languages are primarily spoken phenomena, and only secondarily written. But it is a historical fact that written languages are more prestigious than unwritten ones. This has nothing to do with the complexity or richness or the systematic nature of a language's grammar, however. Unwritten languages are just as rich, complex and systematic as written ones. They simply tend to belong to cultures with a different grasp of technology - to groups of people who have not acquired literacy, or who live in a literate culture but have been disprivileged or denied access to education and technology.

  If it's a language, then why is AAVE not spoken by any country?

  Languages existed long before the modern world became organized into "countries", or nation-states. A languages doesn't need to be the official speech of a nation-state in order to be real. Yet it is a fact that giving such official status tends to increase the prestige of a language. "African Americans", literally speaking, are people with African ancestry whose cultural home is in the Americas, from Nova Scotia to Argentina. There is no reason they should all speak English, and they do not. There is no reason they should not speak other languages and dialects than their national standards (English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese), and many of them do.

  Descendants of enslaved Africans are, by and large, peoples who have been discriminated against, who have been denied access to technologies and education, or educated in traditions foreign to their own experience. They are peoples who have had power - power to govern their own lives and societies - withheld from them by others. It shouldn't be surprising that the way they speak in their communities is often slandered as poor, inadequate or corrupt, and even said not to exist at all. It is not surprising that their speech forms have rarely been given official status by governments or education systems. It is not even surprising that many members of these communities have come to believe their native speech is inferior, simply because it is different. This is part of a historical pattern of discrimination, but it is not logically based on any facts about their languages.

  AAVE is just one of many African American language systems; others include Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole, Louisiana French Creole, the Gullah language of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, Palenquero of Colombia, Papiamentu of the Netherlands Antilles, and the Maroon languages of Guyana and Suriname (Saramakkan, Aluku, etc.), just to name a few. The speakers of these languages all share some history related to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism, but are diverse in other respects; similarly, they share some aspects of grammar but are diverse in others. The extent to which these two dimensions (history and language structure) can be linked is the subject of the discipline known as pidgin and creole studies. Many controversies about the origins and resemblance of these language varieties are hotly debated by linguists and creolists - but almost all of them would agree with nearly everything I have said here.

  Who exactly uses "Ebonics"?

  One reason linguists don't use the term "Ebonics" very happily is that it is very vague, and so such questions are hard to answer. We generally use the term "African American Vernacular English", or AAVE, instead to mean the kinds of speech characteristically spoken by working-class U.S. African Americans, within their community, at occasions calling for intimacy or informality.

  Linguists know very well that there are African Americans who cannot speak this dialect with native fluency; that there are some non-African Americans who can (though very few); and that almost all African Americans have some command of other forms of English, including Standard American English. In fact, there are characteristically African American ways of speaking the latter - which means there is a Standard African American English, too. A very large number of African American adults are perfectly at home with both AAVE and Standard American English, and are skilled at using each in the appropriate circumstances.

  It seems sensible, then, to speak of a generalized family of dialects - AAE, or African American English - which includes all the various ways of speaking characteristic of African Americans: standard and vernacular, working- and middle-class, in settings formal and professional or informal and intimate. It is sensible, also, to use the term AAVE for a particular branch of AAE. When people say "Ebonics," they often refer to this system, which linguists have studied the most.
• 

  Leolaia

  Encyclopedia: African American Vernacular English

  African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), also called Ebonics (see below), Black English, or Black English Vernacular (BEV) is a dialect of American English. Strictly speaking, there is some controversy in the larger community about whether it should be considered a dialect, but this is based on difference of opinion about what it means to be a dialect. Among working linguists there is no such controversy. Similar to common Southern US English, the dialect is spoken in many African-American communities in the United States, especially in urban areas. It has its origins in the culture of enslaved Americans and also has roots in England.
  
  The term Ebonics, which is a portmanteau word of ebony and phonics has been suggested as an alternative name for this dialect, but that name is not widely used in linguistic literature, although it enjoys considerable common use, as a result of the controversy surrounding it (see below). Robert L. Williams, a linguistics professor at Washington University created the term Ebonics in 1973, then detailed it in his 1975 book, Ebonics: The True Language of Black Folks.
  
  

  History

  As a language develops, its use by isolated and diverging groups of people also becomes isolated and divergent. AAVE is largely based on the Southern American English variety, an influence that has no doubt been reciprocal as the dialects diverged. The traits of AAVE which separate it from standard English include changes in pronunciation along definable patterns, distinctive slang, as well as differences in the use of tenses.
  
  Sociologists, linguists and psychologists generally believe that it is common for oppressed people (as, for example, African slaves in the Americas) to adopt a radically different dialect from their oppressors. This is done to subtly rebel against the oppressor and his culture, and to differentiate themselves, as well as to foster pride among their community. Slaveholders generally considered the changes in speech to be due to inferior intelligence.
  
  Most speakers of AAVE are bidialectical in that they command Standard American English (SAE) to some degree in addition to AAVE, switching between using SAE forms and AAVE forms depending on social context.
  
  

  Grammatical features

  While it is true that AAVE eschews much of the inflectional morphology of SAE, that in and of itself is insufficient to demonstrate inferiority, as Modern English has a drastically simplified morphology compared to Old English. Furthermore, there are unique aspects that help make AAVE as complete as any other dialect, and in fact AAVE has some grammatical forms that require circumlocutions in SAE.

  Aspect marking with be

  The most distinguishing feature of AAVE is the use of forms of be to mark aspect in verb phrases. The use or lack of a form of be can indicate whether or not the performance of the verb is of a habitual nature. In SAE, this can only be expressed using adverbs like usually.

• The invariant use of be is used to describe a habitual action. For example He be eating rice (= "he eats rice regularly/frequently/habitually") versus He eating rice (= "he is eating rice right now"). This may be derived from creole dialects which use does be similarly, common in Gullah, Guyana, Trinidad and Barbados. The word steady can also be added as an intensifier to form the present intensive habitual progressive. Example: He be steady preaching (="He is often/habitually/usually preaching in an intensive, sustained manner").
• A non-stressed been indicates the present perfect progressive. Example: He been talking to her (="He has been talking to her").
• Stressed been is used as a marker indicating that the action was begun at some subjectively defined point in the past. Example: She BEEN had that house (="She's had that house for a long-time and still has it"); this is called the present perfect progressive with remote inception. Speakers of standard American English often misinterpret this tense, believing that, in our example, the woman no longer has that house but used to have it.
• Be done is used as a tense marker to indicate the conditional perfect, a future in the hypothetical past. Example: Soon, he be done fixing the leak (="Soon, he will have fixed the leak")
• The present progressive drops the form of be. This is likely because the be form would otherwise indicate habitual aspect. Example: He running (="He is running"). This elimination of the verb occurs in precisely the situations where contractions are legal in standard English.
  
  Note: sometimes AAVE-distinctive uses of the word been are spelled bin. Although the British English pronunciation of been differs from that of bin, they are pronounced the same both in SAE and AAVE.

  Negation

  In addition, negatives are formed differently from standard American English:
• Multiple negations (e.g. I didn't go nowhere) are common in AAVE, but considered unacceptable in SAE (see double negative)
• If the subject is indefinite (e.g. nobody instead of Sally or he), it can be inverted with the negative qualifier (turning Nobody knows the answer to Don't nobody know the answer, also adding multiple negation). This emphasizes the negative, and is not interrogative, as it would be in SAE.

  Other grammatical characteristics

• Present tense verbs are uninflected for person: there is no -s ending in the present tense third person singular. Example: She write poetry (="She writes poetry")
• There is no -s ending indicating possession---the genitive relies on adjacency. This is similar to many creole dialects throughout the Caribbean Sea. Example: my baby mama (="my baby's mama")
• The word it denotes the existence of something, equivalent to Standard English there in "there is", or "there are". Examples It's a doughnut in the cabinet (="There's a doughnut in the cabinet") and It is no God (="There is no God").
• Altered clause order in questions: She tryin' to act white. She think who the hell she is? (="She's trying to act white. Who the hell does she think she is?")
  
  Some of these characteristics, notably double negatives and the use of been for "has been", are also characteristic of general colloquial American English.
  
  Linguist William Labov carried out and published the first thorough grammatical study of African American Vernacular English in 1965.