Richard Bennett. What a putz. He's also the one who demanded that Terri Schiavo be starved to death and insulted everybody who disagreed. I'm glad I'm not in the same company with him.
I wouldn't worry too much about Bennett. The guy just ain't a very deep thinker. I once wrote something reasonably intelligent here, and he accused me of being "Harvey Bialy" -- 'cuz, fortuitously, we share the same initials!
Regarding Ebonics. From what I recall from my brief foray into linguistics, in Ebonics you can say the following:
he be working
he working
one of them means "he has a job - i.e. is working as a continuing action", the other "he is working at the moment - i.e. as a discrete action" (I don't remember which is which) I.e. they are actually two different verb tenses. The closest thing I know of in other languages is the French imparfait, which is a continuing action, and the passe compose, which is a discrete action, but they are in the past.
In any case, the point is that this construct applies to any verb where it makes sense, and moreover, any Ebonics speaker knows the difference and reacts appropriately according to the distinct meanings. Given that Ebonics is essentially *nowhere* taught formally to the people who speak it, nor do parents systematically instruct and correct their children in it, what Mr. Bennett would have to explain is how on earth millions of Ebonics speakers figure out how to use thousands of verbs this way without any formal training, unless, like the case in French, it is a unique dialect with it's out syntax and semantics, albeit very close to American Standard English, since the two are largely mutually intelligible.
Largely but not entirely; a really thick ebonics speaker is very hard for mainstream English speakers to understand. The different verb tenses mixed with pronunciation mixed with slang can make it quite difficult.
You can now pick up books written by linguists which attempt to codify AAVE, a.k.a. "ebonics." It's not taught many places but it has a place in the study of linguistics.
This is what poor befuddled Richard can never understand: linguistics is a science, and these scientists documented and described AAVE generations ago. Its existence is as uncontroversial among these scientists as the existence of black holes is among phycisists.
I may disagree with you about ID and HIV, but I agree with you on Ebonics, and it's even my field (or was).
You're right, it's an uncontroversial claim in linguistics that AAVE exists. I think what started the feeding frenzy during the Ebonics episode was the claim that it was a different language rather than a dialect - a concept which got translated in the popular media as a claim that "dumb Californians think bad English is a language". I'm on the fence myself as to whether AAVE should be considered a language or a dialect of a language, but since there is no percise definition which would differentiate them, it's kind of a silly debate. I can understand the point that the Oakland folks were trying to make, which is that trying to teach a AAVE speaker Standard English is a task very much like (to borrow Geoffrey Pullum's example) teaching a Swedish-speaking child to speak standard Norwegian. Given that, it makes sense for school systems with a large AAVE-speaking population to approach it not as teaching 'good' English to kids who speak it 'wrong' but to approach it as teaching standard English to kids who speak a different language, albeit one with origins in common with Standard.
Anyone who thought it was just a politically-correct attempt to treat slang as a language doesn't get the topic.
No, they don't get the topic at all. And you're right, linguists don't make the hard and fast distinctions between "language" and "dialect" that the public does.
The funny thing is, this happens in a lot of places where a non-standard dialect butts up against a dominant dialect: people get mad when you even recognize the non-standard dialect.
There is a good argument to be made that what the Oakland school board was really doing was playing games in order to get more Federal funding for "bilingual education," which is controversial all by itself. Still, some studies have shown that treating a minority dialect with some respect and teaching the standard language with a compare-and-contrast method is effective. But the politics of it tends to turn nasty fast.
Barnes, Hank
he be working
he working
one of them means "he has a job - i.e. is working as a continuing action", the other "he is working at the moment - i.e. as a discrete action" (I don't remember which is which) I.e. they are actually two different verb tenses. The closest thing I know of in other languages is the French imparfait, which is a continuing action, and the passe compose, which is a discrete action, but they are in the past.
In any case, the point is that this construct applies to any verb where it makes sense, and moreover, any Ebonics speaker knows the difference and reacts appropriately according to the distinct meanings. Given that Ebonics is essentially *nowhere* taught formally to the people who speak it, nor do parents systematically instruct and correct their children in it, what Mr. Bennett would have to explain is how on earth millions of Ebonics speakers figure out how to use thousands of verbs this way without any formal training, unless, like the case in French, it is a unique dialect with it's out syntax and semantics, albeit very close to American Standard English, since the two are largely mutually intelligible.
You can now pick up books written by linguists which attempt to codify AAVE, a.k.a. "ebonics." It's not taught many places but it has a place in the study of linguistics.
This is what poor befuddled Richard can never understand: linguistics is a science, and these scientists documented and described AAVE generations ago. Its existence is as uncontroversial among these scientists as the existence of black holes is among phycisists.
You're right, it's an uncontroversial claim in linguistics that AAVE exists. I think what started the feeding frenzy during the Ebonics episode was the claim that it was a different language rather than a dialect - a concept which got translated in the popular media as a claim that "dumb Californians think bad English is a language". I'm on the fence myself as to whether AAVE should be considered a language or a dialect of a language, but since there is no percise definition which would differentiate them, it's kind of a silly debate. I can understand the point that the Oakland folks were trying to make, which is that trying to teach a AAVE speaker Standard English is a task very much like (to borrow Geoffrey Pullum's example) teaching a Swedish-speaking child to speak standard Norwegian. Given that, it makes sense for school systems with a large AAVE-speaking population to approach it not as teaching 'good' English to kids who speak it 'wrong' but to approach it as teaching standard English to kids who speak a different language, albeit one with origins in common with Standard.
Anyone who thought it was just a politically-correct attempt to treat slang as a language doesn't get the topic.
The funny thing is, this happens in a lot of places where a non-standard dialect butts up against a dominant dialect: people get mad when you even recognize the non-standard dialect.
There is a good argument to be made that what the Oakland school board was really doing was playing games in order to get more Federal funding for "bilingual education," which is controversial all by itself. Still, some studies have shown that treating a minority dialect with some respect and teaching the standard language with a compare-and-contrast method is effective. But the politics of it tends to turn nasty fast.