Total Embarassment by a US Congresswoman

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Originally posted by Pelic
Linguistic research into AAVE has been going on since the 1920s or earlier, starting with widely respected Germanic philologists and American dialectologists.. You can ignorantly dismiss it if you want, but the research on the dialect is solid. AAVE is rule/constraint governed just like every other dialect - whether untrained lay people recognize it or not.

I agree she's an idiot - for every reason mentioned, except for the way she talks.

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Dude this is insulting. This is Liberal Academia Elitism at its finest. I'm sure if I give an educational institution a sack full of money to research Goat shit. I'm sure they can come up with some startling facts, as well.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
By the way: those of you who don't follow the link, what Pelic and Malacasta are talking about right now is Ebonics. I can only imagine why they deliberately chose not to use the common term, and instead danced around it with AAVE. I think most of us are well aware of the hyper political abuse that has always been connected to Ebonics.

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I imagine Pelic used the term because that's the way it's used in his teaching. I imagine I used the term because it was the term that the Wiki page he linked to used. It looks to me like you're trying to infer that we're being dishonest.

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Read the traits of Ebonics. It is basically a "get out of jail free" excuse for all kinds of horrible grammar abuses. Things like using "aint", double negatives, leaving off the "has" when "has been" is supposed to be used, leaving off verbs, etc. Its a freakin' joke. Only in the hyper-PC world we live in could junk academics like this persist.

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Junk academics like who?
Seriously, just because you can't see the use of something doesn't mean there isn't a use for it. I know basically nothing about linguistics or language. I know next to nothing about African American culture. I know though, that there are all sorts of complicated arguments about black nationalism and black identity which really need to be looked at in detail with an understanding of the history of Blacks in America if one is going to have something useful to say.

People like Bill Cosby argue from one side of a very involved debate and that side has all sorts of famous and learned and respectable people, so what? Leon Trotsky disagreed with CLR James about the issue too. Who gives a fuck about a given individual making a noise, it's the noise they make that matters.

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Originally posted by Aristotle
By the way: those of you who don't follow the link, what Pelic and Malacasta are talking about right now is Ebonics. I can only imagine why they deliberately chose not to use the common term, and instead danced around it with AAVE. I think most of us are well aware of the hyper political abuse that has always been connected to Ebonics.

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I use the term AAVE because that is how other professional linguists refer to it - precisely because peole with zero understanding of linguistics attach so much, completely uninformed, ideological baggage to the word Ebonics - which is precisely why you used the word Ebonics and made it bold text, to "win" by attaching that uninformed ideological baggage to the conversation.

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Read the traits of Ebonics. It is basically a "get out of jail free" excuse for all kinds of horrible grammar abuses. Things like using "aint", double negatives, leaving off the "has" when "has been" is supposed to be used, leaving off verbs, etc. Its a freakin' joke. Only in the hyper-PC world we live in could junk academics like this persist.

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"Proper" English grammar is an artificial construct based on the speech patterns of those in power - precisely why it's called "Kings/Queens English". It's the way the royal family talked. It's only a "freakin' joke" because you have zero understanding of linguistics or the history of English. Double negatives are routine in Old and Middle English.

The prescriptive rules that most people call "grammar" were imposed by Anglican bishops who controlled England's educational system in the 1750s. In the middle of a debate about whether the Bible should be written in English or Latin, they argued that English sounded barbaric, uneducated and uncivilized and should follow the grammatical structure of Latin to make it less so.

They also said many of the same things you're saying about AAVE about American English in general.

Yet because an entire field of academic research disagrees with your completely uninformed opinion, it's "junk academics". I can't imagine the fit you'd have if someone here were treating your knowledge of the law with the same type of disrespect.

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Most of the people to whom it is attributed speak the way they due because of poor education, laziness, and a society that makes excuses for them every step of the way.

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This is baseless position scientifically. This "deficiency" position is one that was held in the early 20th century when the following type of thing passed for language study.

Ambrose Gonzales - "Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs… wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could… [then] issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was gradually adopted by the other slaves" - The Black Border, 1922

Children acquire the rules/constraints of their speech patterns before they even start school.

You'll have to pardon me if I don't consider a comedian who sells puddin' pops to be a reputable scholar of language.

No one wants to teach Ebonics. That is a popular misconception that rose up during the Oakland City Ebonics resolution controversy. Oakland City schools were asking for federal money under the Federal Bilingual Education Act to set up programs that would target under performing students who had learned AAVE at home and teach them standard English skills as if English were a second language. The goal was to do exactly what you've used as an argument against Ebonics - to "improve the English language acquisition and application skills" of certain black students.

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That lady is a fucking idiot

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I don't think there's any disagreement on that.

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and no amount of ivory tower, white-guilt, self hating research is going to change that.

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She's speaking in a perfectly rule governed language variety, and no amount of ignorant, racist, ideology changes that scientific fact.

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Originally posted by leira
Labeling it as "African American English" does imply certain things(ie. "this is how black people talk"). I'm opposed to labeling things by race in general.

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I do agree with you on this to a degree. It makes it easy to unintentionally imply that all and only black people talk like this - and that is certainly not the case. But at the same time, few people get up in arms when someone calls another English dialect "Scottish English". Eh, I didn't come up with the name. I'm just using a generally accepted one for the dialect. There are some linguists who think calling it "vernacular" suggests that the variety is somehow culturally inferior.

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Originally posted by Pelic
"Proper" English grammar is an artificial construct

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Yeah, I was trying to make this point, but you stated it more eloquently than I did.

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Originally posted by Pelic
I do agree with you on this to a degree. It makes it easy to unintentionally imply that all and only black people talk like this - and that is certainly not the case. But at the same time, few people get up in arms when someone calls another English dialect "Scottish English". Eh, I didn't come up with the name. I'm just using a generally accepted one for the dialect. There are some linguists who think calling it "vernacular" suggests that the variety is somehow culturally inferior.

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Great point, well stated. Perfect example too, as I would know about that.

If people can't speak American right they should go back where they came from!...ok, just kidding, but that was funny (to me anyway).

Seriously though, I would never vote for anyone who spoke like she does, and I would be ashamed to have her as my representative. Regardless of how the currently accepted rules of grammar were put in place, they are important! If you want to be taken seriously you need to be able to speak something close to what is generally agreed upon as proper English, especially if your line of work requires public speaking.

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Originally posted by Gadiantor
Regardless of how the currently accepted rules of grammar were put in place, they are important! If you want to be taken seriously you need to be able to speak something close to what is generally agreed upon as proper English, especially if your line of work requires public speaking.

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Right. It's the same in any context. You can't cry "DISCRIMINATION" when you walk up to McDonalds and have trouble ordering in Elbonian. The recommendation when singing opera is to use a British accent, even when you and your audience are all (say) Australians, because correct (formal) English is the most clear way to communicate. When you're in public speaking of any sort, you're there to communicate, not to show off your background. Yes, your accent will come through; but taking a little care with how you speak is a marked improvement over sloppiness of any kind.

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Originally posted by Pelic

It's only a "freakin' joke" because you have zero understanding of linguistics or the history of English.

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This is your final warning, Pelic. Cut it out with the personal attacks. I already let a few slide, but its getting old. Disagree with me as much as you want. I like discussing things with people who disagree with me. But you have a bad habit of constantly making it personal. Stop it. Furthermore, you don't know the details of my education. So stop making embarrassing and incorrect assumptions.

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Originally posted by Pelic

"Proper" English grammar is an artificial construct based on the speech patterns of those in power - precisely why it's called "Kings/Queens English".

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The prescriptive rules that most people call "grammar" were imposed by Anglican bishops who controlled England's educational system in the 1750s.

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Honestly, that sounds like white guilt to me. It reeks of an implication that we shouldn't care about grammar since it was codified by white royalty and bishops.

Obviously grammar is an artificial construct. But its an extremely useful and important one. Those who fail to understand and use this construct are crippling themselves as far as their ability to interact meaningfully with others on a higher level.

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Originally posted by Pelic

Yet because an entire field of academic research disagrees with your completely uninformed opinion, it's "junk academics".

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First, you've gone personal again. My opinion is not uninformed. You don't know anything about my education or the types of things I've researched in great detail for my work.

Second, the entire field of linguistics does not agree with the arguments you have made here. I cannot even believe you'd say such an absurd thing. This is a highly contentious topic - even in academia.

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Originally posted by Pelic

I can't imagine the fit you'd have if someone here were treating your knowledge of the law with the same type of disrespect.

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There you go again - making it personal.

I said nothing of your knowledge of linguistics. You are the one making this personal. I have not. Do not attribute your love for attacking me personally with anything reciprocal. I did not treat your knowledge of linguistics with disrespect. If I treated anything with disrespect, it is the politically correct movement to justify Ebonics as a legitimate form of speech.

You used Ebonics as an excuse and justification for this Congresswoman's speech. Many of those who do believe Ebonics is a legitimate dialect certainly would not state it is acceptable for a US Congressman to use it on the floor of the Congress.

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Originally posted by Pelic

She's speaking in a perfectly rule governed language variety, and no amount of ignorant, racist, ideology changes that scientific fact.

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I snipped part of your post, but I understand and am sensitive to the idea of programs that are customized to help "Ebonics speaking" children learn proper American English. There is definitely some merit to that. But US Congresswoman Corinne Brown isn't a 5 year old showing up to kindergarten. She's someone who supposedly went through all levels of formal education and obtained graduate degrees. Any disadvantaged upbringing that might have saddled her with Ebonics should have been shed decades ago.

Furthermore, I read through the rules of AAVE and I do not think all of these bumblings are "perfect" examples of any ruleset: changing the names of people you are referring to, dropping the "con" from "congratulate" ("I want to gradulate the University of Florida), stopping randomly in the middle of sentences for no apparent reason other than confusion, randomly breaking single words into multiple words by their syllables ("for being the best ack ....... adem....... ic school"), random phrases that lack necessary words to make sense ("for being the athletic school in the country".... uh, left off something.. "the best", "the worst", "the only"... what?), putting emphasis on the completely wrong syllables - thereby changing the meaning of the word (the difference between offense like in football and offense like breaking the law), pronouncing "coach" as "corch" (where the hell did the R come from?), using words completely wrong ("gators are superb to other schools"... huh?). She wasn't even consistent in her various abuses. Some times she'd do something right, then 2 sentences later do it wrong. If she was speaking Ebonics, then she was failing at that too.

The uniformity of American English and the general lack of dialects has been pointed to by historians as a major strength in our country's development. It would make absolutely no sense, and be terribly counterproductive, to start giving up on that advantage. It is bad enough that we refuse to declare a national language and encourage people to learn it.

The debate as to whether or not AAVE/Ebonics is a language, a dialect, or neither is a purely academic one. But what is not debatable is the fact that speaking Ebonics is a near guarantee of poverty and misery. All ivory tower arguments aside, our citizens would be better off if Ebonics were stamped out completely.

The most insidious thing about the whole Ebonics movement is the fact that it is just another tool in perpetuating the culture of dependency. The more you excuse someone's inability to speak like the rest of the educated masses, the more you consign them to perpetual inferiority. That's not just racist, its dehumanizing.

If Ebonics is a form of English that is spoken at home, or amongst ones friends, or at the local shop whose owners also speak Ebonics or in the workplace, if you work with people who all come from the same background, then I honestly can't see any difference between that and people who speak 'Spanglish' in Australia, or any other form of Pidgin English or non English in their local environment.

I don't get cross when I'm on a tram and I hear people speaking in Spanish or Korean or Chinese or Sudanese. I wouldn't dream of telling them to stop speaking their language in public, or at home, nor would I tell them that their language is a 'movement' that will cripple them.

Obviously everyone should be given the opportunity to gain a good education in the dominant language of whatever country they are living in. Obviously without a good grasp of the main language in that country, a person will face obstacles, sometimes crippling obstacles.

But just as many non English speaking people who learn English as a second language do exceedingly well, so too could people with Ebonics as their first language. It's not Ebonics or the 'Ebonics movement' that stops people speaking 'proper English' - there's nothing inherently stupefying about it that stunts people's intellectual growth.

One of my best mates is the most occa, skin headed bogan you could picture (he's from near Moe, which will help some of our Australian readers understand the extent of his boganhood). He makes Steve Irwin sound like Henry Higgins. You'd write him off as a moron and a gun toting redneck until he starts discussing astrophysics and his job as one of the heads of a modelling department at CSIRO. He also played a brass instrument (I can't remember which) in the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Orchestra. He also is a lefty and militant unionist (which is where I come in I guess). Probably my friend speaks quite nice English in his job - I wouldn't know - or maybe he's such a talent that his thick, almost impenetrable, accent is seen as some sort of handicap that he has overcome.

But people who assume he is a moron do so because of their own prejudice and class based misconceptions - his accent tells you very little about him. Someone who uses Ebonics tells me very little about them, except that they are in some way associated with a Black culture that uses that dialect.

This woman has given a piss poor performance on a topic that she clearly knows very little about in a venue where it couldn't be less relevant. If she is using Ebonics because she always uses Ebonics, then she got elected as someone who speaks that way - possibly she represents an electorate that speaks similarly. If that's the case then whatever. If she was being cute then that's pretty pathetic - but whatever.

I don't think you can conclude from this woman though, any of the conclusions that seem to be being drawn from this thread.

I don't know how to put this next comment without making the situation worse, but I honestly believe that you often post with a lot of venom Ari, that's how your posts read to me. When I read something like this "It wasn't until modern, bed wetting, apologist, self-hating, white guilt academics started inventing crap like "African American Vernacular" that garbage like this even existed. " as a response to Pelic indicating that he was an academic who used AAVE, it is clear that you are being intentionally insulting. And then later on when you say both Pelic and myself are using the term AAVE in a dishonest way (because we are presumably bed wetting apologist self hating white guilt posters), you are also being insulting so it strikes me as odd that you'd be balking at people responding in kind.

I can't help but wonder if both sides of the left right divide on this board have ideological blinkers that excuse their own vitriol and yet read bad intent from the other side without much reason.