[lit-ideas] Re: For the linguists...(and others)
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:39:22 EDT
Thanks!
Yes, 'minute' can be a bother. I run the Grice Club and I usually refer to
the 'minutes' of the club. I don't know where this idea that a minute must
last 60 secs originates. Apparently, a minute could be ANY PERIOD of time.
Yes, 'bilingual English' is fun.
The article WAS fun -- for you and me -- but not for a drug dealer! It was
all about profiling and about drug abuse and all that sh*t. And they were
being so stereotypical. There IS a lot of slang, involved -- and Geary is
right that this is an intra-racial thing. Someone who speaks EBONICS does not
need a 'translator'.
When they bring in the old linguist (or odd linguist) (Baugh, etc.) to
have yet again repeated in our ears that 'all dialects are born equal' -- such
a lie! I am a conservative at THAT point. I learned it the HARD way. I DO
love English dialects, but J. Honey (in "Language and Power", Faber) is
right about this. As one man back in 1870 was complaining:
"I don't want my lad to speak with the Lancashire
broad -- I want him to speak smart".
The Milroys in Ulster attempted what Oakland attempted with Ebonics: speak
and let speak. But it's never so SIMPLE.
So, there are so many issues involved: phonics -- I had not realised that
ebonics is a pun on 'phonics' is the most basic. Then there's the lexical
and the morphosyntactic (to avoid using 'grammar', as per Geary's "He be
right"). THEN there's the pragmatics. And this is where Grice fits in.
But then there's the social level (sociolinguistic) which is
macrolinguistic and beyond 'implicature'.
It is assumed that ebonics is a register -- they can SWITCH. It's a
code-switch. It's ok if you want to spread it to teach arithmetics "2 + 2 be
four" makes more sense in that 'be' is eternal and timeless. It's different if,
as the article does, it focuses on the bad side to it -- drug dealing,
traficking, and the use of something that many regard as a pidgin as a code
(used by "Hispanics" and 'some whites' the article read -- who rely on it just
BECAUSE it IS incomprehensible.
It's like when the Americans had that great song to annoy the Japanese:
Mares eat oats and the rest of it. This started as a wartime code that a
Japanese could NOT break.
The language of 'drug' (pot) is so rich -- that I think it DOES transcend
'ebonic'. Oddly, in Mexican, "Mari Juana" can be an aristocratic two first
Christian names, if you think of it!
------
Speranza -- Bordighera
In a message dated 8/25/2010 2:30:14 P.M., juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx writes:
My reaction was amusement colored w/ a dash of astonishment. Can
"ebonics" possibly be so different from "standard English" as to warrant a
translator? And yet ... I once knew an African American woman who lived in an
urban part of town who used the phrase "for a minute" with some frequency. We
seemed to be talking at cross purposes until I finally figured out that
"for a minute" meant, to me, a brief period of time and for her, a long time.
Incidentally while looking for employment I ran across this statement:
"Being bilingual (English) is an advantage." Believe me when I say that I do
not live in an area where English is a second language to very many people.
Not sure what to make of that...
Other related posts: