languages (Ebonics)

From: Bill Pechter <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
Date: Fri Mar 10 09:10:48 2000

> Quite true, but ultimately irrevalent. Were, examples aside, your
> linguistics courses taught in BEV or Standard English? Standard is
> generally a more effective means of data interchange. Linguists can be
> compared to the people who check the plumbing, writers are the ones that
> flush. We're looking at things from a number of different perspectives here.
> The linguist has a purely mechanical interpretation, others a sociological
> bias, or an artistic one. We have to be careful we don't miss each
> others' points, because we all have very differing backgrounds. I don't
> have a problem with dialect, it is as surely interesting as it is
> non-standar - and standardisation is what makes things run.
>
> I use dialect in some of my writing, but there are certainly purposes and
> occasions where it is inappropriate. In those, I would use standard
> English. Here in New England we speak differently, although the
> dialect is not as extreme as BEV, an is mostly pronunciational. Notice
> how media insists on a standard pronunciation, that's why all our local
> tv new readers sound like foreigners. It's really amusing to hear them
> try to say Quonnochontaug for the first time.
>

In New Jersey watch 'em with Manalapan or Piscataway or Parsippany...
or Ho-Ho-Kus...
Those good old Indian names screw up those migrant newsreaders real
quick.


Bill
ex-Print and Radio News person turned computer geek
Received on Fri Mar 10 2000 - 09:10:48 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:05 BST