War on Grammar

Actually, cav, we had an ebonics discussion in one of my classes last semester - all the white kids in the class took the relativist approach and insisted that the ebonics teaching program was disrespectful to black kids because it implied that they were speaking an inferior languge. The two black girls who had spoken ebonics as children supported it because recognising it as another language and learning English as being different from ebonics helped them get through school and into college. Kind of interesting, there.

That's just mesemerising, how English can have differences so wide that people can consider the differences seperate languages. In my formative years, I was subject to Spanish and two versions of English, too, but mine were the English that I'm using now and Renaissance English- my mother was keen on my picking it up, seeing plays, and understanding the differences whilst young so that, unlike others, I wouldn't be thinking 'Um, what does thine mean?' I never needed to change my language to fit in, as fitting in was never my aim if I weren't true to myself. I did, however, adopt phrases that I liked. Now, it's left me thus: I can understand Chaucer with little hassle, Shakespeare, Webster &c with even less, but cannot understand much of either Street language or 'ebonics' at all.

It all bewilders me. In England, they say, 'here's English; read.'

That is interesting rufio. I would only have an objection to teaching ebonics as a replacement for proper English. I have no problems with it as an elective.

See, that's the thing; by the nature of being divergent from 'Proper' English, ebonics is considered 'improper' and thus 'inferior.' I agree; teaching ebonics instead of standard English could be quite the faux pas.

I think the debate about ebonics is really more a question of whether or not it is actually a real language, and not just slang. There are soooo many variants of English, especially among Afro-Carribean communities. Do they all qualify as separate languages, or just regional dialects?

See, cav, they're not teaching ebonics at all. These kids already know ebonics. But they are teaching standard English in terms of ebonics - saying, like, this is how you would say it, and this is how it is in standard. You can use it the way you like when you're at home and talking to your friends, but you use the standard here. See, when I went to English class, they told us to use the standards everywhere. But I didn't speak ebonics either.

Dialect elitism is a very dangerous thing. The very fact that a standard version of a language exists doesn't mean that that "standard" is in some way superior to other varieties of the language. Holding such an opinion will inevitably cause one to look down on speakers of other dialects, or make judgements about intelligence, competence or "laziness" of people based on the dialect they speak. Which dialect rises to become the "standard" variety is an accident often based on who holds political power, who controls the education system or the media, and so on.

Grammar and vocabulary are arbitrary sound-meaning relationships that develop through convention within groups of speakers over time. Arbitrary in the sense that there is no logical reason to use the sound combination "dog" to refer to that particular fuzzy animal versus "kril" other than convention. Grammar rules are similar. Using the particular construction "-ed" to refer to events in the past rather than, say a prefix "ki-" is another arbitrary sound-meaning correspondence developed by convention over time. It is thus unsurprising that there are differences in the way people speak, as people tend to live in isolated communities/neighborhoods. Simply because someone who lives closer to the queen thinks their pronunciation is superior doesn't make it so.

This leads us to the issue of "logic" in language. Some may claim that one construction is more logical than another for whatever reason, but the fact remains that the meanings of utterances are not always composable from the sum of their parts. Consider any set phrase or idiom: "Well that really takes the cake", "Stop pulling my leg!" and so on. The meanings of such phrases are decided by convention. Moving on to actual grammatical constructions, people felt much stronger about using or not using the subjunctive in English 100 years ago. Over time, this concern has become less and less, as the non-subjuctive version has taken over in most speech. Seemingly "illogical" constructions abound in languages: it is considered a cardinal sin by most "grammarians" to say things like "I ain't got none" because that, logically, should mean "I do have some". The double negative construction is actually the norm for forming negation in plenty of romance languages. Are speakers of such languages "less logical"?

The line between "language" versus "dialect" is a fine one that has no clear definition; rather it is often decided by political boundaries rather than true linguistic differences. Things considered separate languages may be mutually intelligible to a high degree (Serbian/Croatian), while dialects of the same "language" may be totally different (Cantonese/Mandarin Chinese).

Speaking RP and considering other people's grammatical manglings as somehow lazy or inferior is in fact a lazy viewpoint in my opinion. Deeming oneself a staunch traditionalist of English may give oneself a feeling of pride in one's language/dialect, but unfortunately this viewpoint is the one of the dinosaurs. Grammars of languages change so drastically over time that forms of the same language spoken in the same place even 50-100 years apart are often unrecognizable as the same language/dialect.

Why is Chaucer's English superior to that spoken today? Isn't it likely that there was significant variation within English during Chaucer's time as well? Chaucer wielded a pen and paper, recording his dialect for posterity, while others did not, lending some artificial element of prestige to his form of the language.

The "aks"/"ask" difference is interesting in the fact that both forms have existed in the language side by side for such a long time, though "aks" was historically first, and "ask" a case of metathesis, in which 2 sounds in a word are interchanged through misanalysis by future speakers.

To sum up, yes it's true that you can often tell someone's social/economical class, race, and age by the way they speak, and one's use of language may indidcate the amount of education one has undertaken; however, in no way is the form of the language inherently superior, more or less logical, or indicative of the actual intelligence of the speaker.

I hate the way that it is being bastardised by the majority of people.

It seems the majority of people don't speak as you do, or as you'd like them to. I wonder what this really means...

It is laziness. In fact, a few years back, a University asked me to do some research into the way people speak, and over 80% of people across the board made simple, simple grammatical errors. To me, wilfully speaking bad English is putting a dagger through the heart of the language, ..... No one even knows basic rules, never mind use of the subjunctive.

It seems that people know and use the rules they were brought up in the environment of. People do know the rules; the ones in their particular dialect. That their way of speaking differs from yours is not a reflection of their work ethic, laziness, or manners.

Be careful!

PS Please don't take this post as a personal attack. This topic heats me up a great deal due to the sensitive nature of being stigmatized by the variety of a language that one speaks. I strongly suggest taking a look at introductory linguistics texts, especially the sociolinguistics ones.

Welcome to A2K mezzie. I have a feeling I know who you are . Excellent post. I don't think anyone will take it personally.

Actually, if you care to, your insight into linguistics and other languages would be greatly appreciated here, should you have the time.

This is a link to an article written by a "traditionalist". The article itself is the typical fare you get from such authors; the interest lies in the comments posted at the bottom of the page, many by those with a background in linguistics. Makes for some interesting reading!

http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/11/12/3fb2036da67ef

And hi cav

Yes, I am who you think I am. We had a ton of snow dumped on us here today, so I'm home, and I finally remembered the name of this forum, so I thought I'd take a look, and what do I find but this thread!

I should be around the forums now that I've registered. Thanks for the friendly welcome.

Hey Mezzie:

Thanks for posting; you are obviously passionate about what you're writing about- but substantiate it with knowledge-, and I look forward to reading more of your posts: although mostly against you on this point, I appreciate your opinions.

I wasn't criticising 'dialects' of English as such- I'm a proud advocate of what true dialects can do-, but rather I was chastising the fact that they seem to be taking place when standard English should be used; in English Literature exams, as one example. I feel that there is a difference between a true dialect- Scotch- and one that emerges from people's wilful misknowledge and ignorance of a standard language. When people say, 'I ain't got nothing,' on the street or in an exam (and it happens,) they are not attempting to speak a dialect; they are speaking a version of standard English at odds with its basic grammar rules. Perhaps, like in the ebonics case, if people knew both how to speak standard English and this misconstrued collection of wrong things at the wrong time, maybe I would be less harsh.

This is just the starting bit of much that I plan to write... I'd write more (and will tomorrow), but someone's nudging me off the computer; I write primarily to assure you that you're very welcome here and that you've in no way offended me (although you have read some of what I'm trying to say in a way that I didn't intend, which I shall clarify tomorrow.) I will check some things out from the Uni library tomorrow... appreciate that I'm more about languages than linguistics: I chose the French novel tradition over Linguistics and Thought....

I hope to see you around;

A.

Hey Mezzie:

Thanks for posting; you are obviously passionate about what you're writing about- but substantiate it with knowledge-, and I look forward to reading more of your posts: although mostly against you on this point, I appreciate your opinions.

I wasn't criticising 'dialects' of English as such- I'm a proud advocate of what true dialects can do-, but rather I was chastising the fact that they seem to be taking place when standard English should be used; in English Literature exams, as one example. I feel that there is a difference between a true dialect- Scotch- and one that emerges from people's wilful misknowledge and ignorance of a standard language. When people say, 'I ain't got nothing,' on the street or in an exam (and it happens,) they are not attempting to speak a dialect; they are speaking a version of standard English at odds with its basic grammar rules. Perhaps, like in the ebonics case, if people knew both how to speak standard English and this misconstrued collection of wrong things at the wrong time, maybe I would be less harsh.

This is just the starting bit of much that I plan to write... I'd write more (and will tomorrow), but someone's nudging me off the computer; I write primarily to assure you that you're very welcome here and that you've in no way offended me (although you have read some of what I'm trying to say in a way that I didn't intend, which I shall clarify tomorrow.) I will check some things out from the Uni library tomorrow... appreciate that I'm more about languages than linguistics: I chose the French novel tradition over Linguistics and Thought....

I hope to see you around;

A.

Thanks for the (double!) post in response to what I wrote

You're right that I'm passionate about this particular topic!

I do agree with you wholeheartedly about the appropriateness of dialect-use in certain settings. The "standard" language is the medium of choice in academic circles, of course, and academic work written in a non-standard dialect will not be taken seriously (though use of such a dialect in no way takes away from the content of the work itself!). Similarly, academic-sounding speech would get laughed off the stage at a rap contest, unless specifically used for humorous effect (a la Eminem). Using the "proper" variety of a language in a particular context can be crucial for communicating most efficiently.

The major point that we disagree on seems to be the development and status of dialects.

Particularly the following quote:

I feel that there is a difference between a true dialect- Scotch- and one that emerges from people's wilful misknowledge and ignorance of a standard language. When people say, 'I ain't got nothing,' on the street or in an exam (and it happens,) they are not attempting to speak a dialect; they are speaking a version of standard English at odds with its basic grammar rules.

There is so much to disagree with in here! First of all, why is Scotch any more a true dialect, than, say ebonics, or Spanglish, or Singapore English (all 3 of which get derided). Go to New Guinea and listen to the Pidgin English spoken there, which is the national language and has newspapers written in it. 50 years ago it sounded like a joke to speakers of "standard" English. Once again, "standard" English and "established" dialects are social constructs, dictated by political power, geographical borders, and sheer number of speakers, along with their control of media outlets, publishing, and so on.

How can one possess "willful misknowledge"? If one doesn't know something, they can't willfully disobey or change it! I would reckon that you are likely far more ignorant of the language used by Eastern Canadian fishermen than they are of Standard English. They may have a passive knowledge of it, but in a sense are bilingual, while you remain monolingual. (of course I have no idea what varieties of English you may be familiar with; this is just an illustrative example)

What I'd like to stress are the following 2 points:

1. Development of one dialect into a standard variety is nothing more than an accident of "being in the right place at the right time", if you will. In other words, the "right" people happen to speak it, so it spreads.

2. People speak the variety of a language they are comfortable with and grew up speaking. So when someone says: "I ain't got nothing", whether they are familiar with Standard English or not is irrelevant. They are not "willfully" ignoring rules of Standard English grammar and creating new constructs willy-nilly; they are simply saying what they are used to saying, based on actual rules of grammar in their dialect.

A very interesting example of this is Black American English as spoken here in Philadelphia. Many "educated" people listen to this and think black people don't know how to conjugate even the simple verb "to be". This is because you hear sentences like "He be flipping over dat" and other such utterances.

Research shows that the use of "be" for the 3rd person form rather than "is" is actually highly constrained to certain contexts. Both "is" and "be" co-exist, and have different aspectual uses. In other words, our "standard" variety, having only "is", lacks this richness that the so-called "inferior" variety of English possesses.

Now, just to be clear, we may be talking around each other if the only thing you really mean is that people should use Standard English when it's appropriate to do so, and they should feel free to use their own dialect in other situations. I sense, however, that you don't have a clear sense of the difference between "breaking basic grammar rules of standard English" and "simply speaking a separate variety of the language".

The fact that you said this:

Perhaps, like in the ebonics case, if people knew both how to speak standard English and this misconstrued collection of wrong things at the wrong time, maybe I would be less harsh.

was the most disturbing thing to me!

Based on this quote alone, it sounds as though you truly believe that ebonics is somehow "wrong", and hence "inferior", and that people who ONLY speak ebonics are inferior FOR THIS REASON. I hope that you can come to see that on the contrary, ebonics is a rich variety of English spoken by millions of people (many of whom do not know Standard English very well at all) with the same expressive power as the standard language, and a huge, highly creative oral literature (rap music).

In general, new vocabulary items, grammatical structures, and usage crop up for a variety of reasons: teenage "slang" as a backlash against authority figures, borrowed words to fill gaps in scientific vocabulary, coining new words using existing grammatical structures and so on. Whether they stick around to be adopted by the standard language or remain forever within a particular variety of the language is in no way related to the content of the structures themselves. It is almost random, in fact. Sometimes when communities of speakers are isolated from each other for long enough (like blacks and whites in the United States, who are largely still living segregated lives), enough changes develop to create totally different dialects. Enough time passes, and you end up with mutually unintelligible languages, like the Germanic languages or Romance languages, or going back further, Indo-European languages.

We'll leave the discussion of historical linguistics to another thread, though

OK, I've rambled on long enough! Sorry for the long post.

Long posts are appreciated here, especially when as pointed and precise as yours there mezzie, if that's your real name.

hahahaha!

You can call me "kaonashi" if you prefer (see avatar for details).

-James

You should come into the language and thought thread, mezzie. Maybe they will listen to that side of the argument if it comes from someone other than me.

But within a language, I think, there are right and wrong ways of constructing grammar - it may not be logical to have -ed as the past tense ending, but that's the way the rule goes in english. Some of these things are malleable, but I think that parts of speech need to remain separate in order to be understood - and if the variation isn't understood, it won't be perpetuated.

I'll check it out rufio, thanks.

I think that parts of speech need to remain separate in order to be understood - and if the variation isn't understood, it won't be perpetuated.

I definitely agree with the second part of your statement.

As for the first part, something to keep in mind is that the whole notion of "part of speech" is based on descriptive distributional categories. In other words, a word qualifies as a noun if it can be the subject of a sentence, and so on (simplified example, but illustrates the point).

As understanding of the structure of language grows deeper, types and categories expand, and more is understood about how we use language flexibly. The categories themselves likely do not exist as mental constructs, as is evidenced by much creative language use, so to say a word is an noun and should not be used as an adjective (as I saw in the "fun as an adjective" thread) is kind of missing the point. The categories are merely convenient labels for expository purposes.

Descriptive grammar texts written by professionally-trained linguists will have far more detail and parts-of-speech categories than those written by typical prescriptive grammarians, though they are still labels, rather than things which actually exist.

Well, language as a whole is a construct, so you really can't get much more real in your categorization. You could say that the word "dog" being a noun is merely constructed, but the idea that "dog" is a word is actually a construct as well (as opposed to being a collection of sounds), so that's not really significant to say that parts of speech are constructs or not. They are labels, but they are only labels for other labels, in any case.

As far as defining "real" categories or parts of speech, they exist where the "real" meanings of words like "dog" exist - in the minds of the speakers. So, yeah, descriptive analysis is going to be more useful than prescriptive - but descriptive can still be defined and organized into rules that are always followed, albeit more complicated ones. "Fun" would have two entires I think - as a noun and as an adjective, not one for both - it would mean different things in different contexts, not just to anyone who listened, but to the speaker as well.

Right, that's good stuff

One thing worth expanding on: we're slightly off in our respective ideas of what I meant by "construct", I think.

While "dog" is a word with a particular meaning, it remains unclear how this information is actually stored in memory; whether there are separate "entries", what those entries contain, and so on. So while "dog" is in a sense, a label, it is not a label in the same way that the category "noun" is.

Terms such as noun, adjective, and so on, are META-LANGUAGE: words used to talk about language itself, while "dog" is part of the language. Of course "noun", etc. are words in the language in the same way the "dog" is (which is why this gets confusing!), but it is unclear whether the CATEGORIES THEMSELVES possess reality outside language in the same way that "dog" does. Hope that garbled example made sense!

So descriptivists who create terms to aid in categorization don't necessarily get everything right, because we simply don't know even close to everything there is to know about how words, etc. are represented in the brain. It is simply one step to break things down into more manageable chunks to digest when studying language. Empircal research with statistically significant results testing hypotheses about these things is the next step to increasing understanding.

Psycholinguistics is the field to look into for information about how words are stored in the brain. Lexical entries, semantic fields, fuzzy networks, and so on, are all interesting theories, but not proved results.

I hear through the grapevine that you're minoring in linguistics. Glad to hear it!

I looked through the Language and Thought thread, but think I'll pass on getting involved over there. There's so much basic stuff (such as definitions of terms!) that's being missed to jump in at this point.