Are you that dense? The reason why no one translated it is because the words are made up! It has nothing to do with “Black English”. The only reason you made that connection is because the singer is black. We gave you examples of other songs with made up words (Who Put the Bop, Banana-fana-bo-banna, etc.) to point out that that song is not unique, but you still didn’t get it. Jay-Z makes up words in his song, that’s his thing, and he just happens to be black. In short, just because a black person utters jibberish doesn’t make it an example of AAVE.
If no one knows what they are saying, then why do they say it? Sane people do not usually go around making nonsense sounds. (Although even a white girl like me knows that “bling-bling” at least is not a nonsense sound at all, but rather a slang term for a certain kind of jewelry.) When they do, it’s generally meant to be fun or humorous, like rhyming games or…songs with nonsense lyrics! That has nothing to do with dialect, though. It’s just people being silly and trying to make others laugh, something that happens among speakers of all languages and dialects.
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Uh, yeah, funny songs with nonsense lyrics are not an example of a dialect. For instance, “Koo-koo-kajoob” is not an example of the Scouse dialect, even though a guy from Liverpool wrote those lyrics! I’m sorry if you’ve been frustrated here, but people were probably trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and assumed that since this is a thread about AAVE you must really be talking about AAVE, despite your stupid and inappropriate inclusion of nonsense song lyrics as an “example”. But since your only apparent point is that you don’t like songs with silly nonsense lyrics perhaps you should go start a thread about that instead, since it has nothing to do with the topic at hand here.
I haven’t any Spam. = Queen’s English.
I don’t have any Spam. = Standard American English
I ain’t got no Spam. = Lazy English Gibberish
Is this what you mean?
The legitimacy of AAVE has nothing to do with whether or not you can understand slang (“bling-bling”) or word games (“shizzle mah nizzle”). As far as “NO ONE” knowing what they are saying (your emphasis), you are mistaken. You do not understand what they are saying which means absolutely nothing unless you are, in fact, the target of the expression in which case the speaker has made a grevious error.
Or, as in the case of such notable efforts as “Mairzy Doats and Dozey Doats,” it is someone having fun with the language. The example you cited is an example of the sort of thing that occurred in scat in the 1930s - 1970s (with similar word games recorded in Shakespeare and Burns, to name just two noted authors who indulged themselves in such games).
Where do you hear “Bling-bling” and “Shizzle mah nizzle” in common discourse? You might hear bling bling as a term if you are listening in on a discussion of jewelry. You might hear the other phrases if you are listening to someone using the slang variant of AAVE (which, being a dialect, has its own slang derivations). However, nizzle seems no less clear to me (or have any less valid origins) than farkin’ or dweeb or any other neologisms.
Taking word games out of songs and trying to condemn an entire dialect based on your failure to understand them does not make a strong case for your claim.
I’d just like to say for the record that “fo’ shizzle my nizzle” means “for sure, my nigga”. It’s just a word game. As far as I know Whatsisname invented the phrase, and it is very rare to hear anyone say it without at least a little tongue-in-cheek grin.
I hope VirgoWitch didn’t get banned just because of her post in this forum. A lot of people hold the belief that if Standard English isn’t spoken that it prevents people from getting jobs they might otherwise be qualified for. Hopefully it was another post that resulted in the ban. Otherwise I am shocked. But these forums are pretty liberal and extremely PC it seems to me. So maybe that was the reason. Anyone know?
Man, did you actually read her post? It was a lot harsher than “If people can’t speak SEV, they might not be able to get good jobs!”
As to why she was actually banned, if you’re really curious you should probably e-mail a moderator. They tend to frown upon discussing bannings publically, especially in any forum other than The Pit.
virgowitch was banned? Didn’t know that. Nope, don’t think it was for the post in this thread. If you have a question as to why he/she was banned, the best thing to do is e-mail the admins because they don’t like us talking about it on the boards.
Hey, I think we all should be privy to the information if someone asks, but I don’t run the show here.
Actualy it is a double negative which would mean that you in fact did have some spam.
This was kind of the point I was trying to get at. The words have been changed to such a point that they become incomprehensible. When meanings and structures are changed to such a degree, then they stop being english and start to become a diffrent language.I will conceed that my song quote wasnt the best way to make my point.
Good post, BURNER. I think most of us focused on the example instead of your point.
FTR, I never thought too much about “ebonics” untill I got caught up in the thread I linked to. But, the idea behind the study of AAVE is central to my continuing the discussion in this thread. ie: What makes a dialect? How does one form? What makes it different from the standard language from which that dialect formed?
To me, this isn’t about understanding a black man’s speech from inner city Detroit. It’s trying to understand how language works. Any language. AAVE offers the opportunity to examine this. The AAVE students as ESL students is mearly a sidebar in the big picture.
That’s why I’m not posting so much in my own thread. I’m just sitting here, benefitting from all the specialists. And from other’s informed opinions.
Incomprehensible to you. Obviously there are people who can comprehend them, at the very least the person who originally came up with the word game/slang term. Changing words around in amusing ways is what word games are all about, and inventing new words or giving new meanings to old words so only “in” people will understand you is what slang is all about. Again, this has nothing to do with dialect at all. These sorts of things are found among speakers of all dialects, especially young people who want to be funny or cool.
Or maybe, just maybe, they start to become a different dialect.
As can I. Not as well as someone who grew up speaking AAVE or in an AAVE-rich environment, and I can’t keep up with the slang used by many young AAVE speakers, but I certainly understand AAVE much better than I do German – and I have several years of formal German instruction under my belt and am told I speak it pretty well for an American.
To use Ol’Gaffer’s earlier example, “She crying” is an AAVE phrase that should be pretty easy for a speaker of any English dialect to understand. The exact connotation and the difference between “She crying” and “She be crying” are not obvious to SEV speakers due to a grammatical rule with no real SEV equivelant (this is probably the number one textbook example of grammatical differences between the dialects), but the general sense of the phrase should be just as clear to my grandmother as it is to a “gangbanger”.
We should just link all these threads on Race and Dialect together, because both terms are so subjective. When does one race blend into another, when does one dialect blend into another… there simply is NO scientific consensus. If you ask a linguist about Swedish and Norweigian, he’ll likely say that they are really just dialects of “Scandanavian”. But they’re always treated as seperate languages even though most speakers of each can understand the other quite well. And yet is common to speak of dialects of “Chinese” (say Mandarin and Cantonese) when those speakers really CAN’T understand each other.
If you have trouble understanding a dialect (as some here claim about AAVE), it’s probably that you just don’t hear it enough. I can remember travelling in Scotland. With 100% certainty I could never understand what a person said to me when they walked up out of the blue and started talking. But if I was in a conversation where I had some context, it wasn’t too hard to understand. Seems like the brain can pick things out better when it can make some guesses about what things will be said.
And as for AAVE having no rules, that makes absolutely no sense. If it had no rules, then the speakers themselves wouldn’t understand it and it wouldn’t last very long, now would it? If people seem to be speaking something without rules, it’s proably just that you haven’t yet figured the rules out.
You may be familiar with the old linguistic joke “A language is a dialect with an army”. It’s true enough that the difference between what is generally thought of as two different languages and two dialects of the same language is often as much political as anything else. The only things linking many of the Chinese “dialects” are a shared written language and a shared nationality. I don’t speak either, but as you say, they seem to be mutually unintelligable – on more than one occasion I’ve seen a native Mandarin speaker and a native Cantonese speaker decide that it was easier just to speak English to one another! I wouldn’t be surprised if the two “dialects” were even less closely related than, say, English and German. From a purely linguistic standpoint dialects are more closely related and share more vocabulary and grammar than seperate languages, but there’s no hard and fast rule for where you draw the line.
Noam Chomsky (my hero!) has argued that to an alien linguist it would appear that all human beings speak the same language, it’s just that we have a lot of different and often mutually unintelligable dialects.
