languages (Ebonics)

From: John Wilson <wilson_at_dbit.dbit.com>
Date: Thu Mar 9 13:55:52 2000

On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 10:55:38AM -0800, sjm wrote:
> BEV follows strict rules of grammar and word use, and has syntactic
> roots in several major west African languages like Ewe, Iwo,
> and Yoruba. It really is not gibberish at all, no matter how
> "wrong" it sounds to a native Standard American English speaker
> (me included). In some ways, it actually allows much finer grained
> shades of meaning than SAE does.

I'd love to see an example of this! What really catches my attention is
when someone begins a sentence with "know what I'm saying?", there's a lot
of stuff like that that's really annoyingly meaningless. Also I'm not
sure how much can really be traced to Africa, since a lot of this stuff
really seems to have only cropped up in the past few generations. Ahhhh,
what ever happened to Jive? Now *that* was fun to listen to! Ehh, I mean,
that was a thing to which it was fun to listen. Never mind...

John Wilson
D Bit
Received on Thu Mar 09 2000 - 13:55:52 GMT