Gross. That’s not my reason at all, don’t try to enlist me into this nasty classist nonsense. I teach them bourgeonics because we live in a society ruled by the bourgeoisie, and it makes my students more powerful if they know the dialect spoken and written by the bourgeoisie. And also there’s plenty of lovely stuff written in bourgeoisie dialect worth being able to access. The idea that bourgeoinics is some sort of Ur-English that contains all other dialects is some hilarious ignorance.
Or they might run Mama Dip’s Country Kitchen. Classist gourmands who insist that French Cuisine is the Only Cuisine would be like @wolfpup, if they maintained that French cuisine contains all other cuisines, and a Le Cordon Bleu diploma also gave you the ability to fry a perfect hushpuppy.
“Octopuses” is IMHO typically best. “Octopodes” is most appropriate to use to mess with someone who “corrects” the use of “octopuses” with “octopi”.
I’ve never quite gotten why we have the conceit of pluralizing Latin origin words according to Latin rules, but Greek origin ones according to English norms.
That said if enough people use “octopi” then it would no longer be wrong.
I think we should just stop lumping them together and respect each octopus as an individual with their own hopes and dreams. So I’m denouncing all forms of the plural as ideologically unsound. If you must generalize, please circumlocute by referring to “Eileen and her conspecifics”.
You are missing the real travesty. “Pous” is a masculine noun in Greek, I believe. The singular is messed up and should be “octopux”. At least ask Eileen how they feel about it!
(To avoid any misunderstanding, do not take that joke as a criticism of either “LatinX” or gender pronoun norms having changed. As serious fodder though, both however do represent language evolution in the act and debates over what is “right”.)
I’ve got a couple of questions for you, though I’m not optimistic about getting a serious reply. Though hopefully you won’t go so far as to (if I may coin a phrase) “do a @Riemann”, which is to resort to snickering mockery when a ridiculous argument is refuted, the last occasion being his ridiculous argument that people from different linguistic backgrounds can’t possibly “comfortably converse” and enjoy each other’s company. I don’t know what he was trying to prove but after that dismissive snickering insult I no longer care.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, I do think that someone with a Cordon Bleu accreditation is likely to be able to make a pretty good hushpuppy. What do you think they teach there? French recipes? They teach a wide range of skills, techniques, and principles, extending even beyond cooking into areas like hotel and restaurant management, and the cookery techniques equip a future chef with the basic skills and knowledge to excel at preparing a wide range of foods.
The analogy with language is apt. Someone with a mastery of standard English who is well acquainted not only with its rules of grammar but with the reasons and principles underlying them is not likely to have great difficulty learning and code-switching to another dialect. Indeed, it’s been said that such individuals often have an easier time than other learning another language.
My other question is this. Who do you think would have an easier task: the sort of person I just described code-switching to a different dialect, or someone who had absorbed a single dialect through the experiential learning of constant repetition – a sort of osmosis – and that person trying to speak the formal dialect of standard English? I think the answer is obvious, and this is what I mean by saying that, as a very broad generalization, one skill set subsumes the others.
If you want a serious reply, how bout you edit away this sort of snide attempt to turn people against one another? It’s a contemptible rhetorical strategy. Get rid of it and we’ll see whether you deserve a serious reply.
The background is on record for all to see. Riemann expressed incredulity that “anyone with a completely different social background but a high level of literacy could immediately communicate fluently and comfortably in any working class dialect”. His response to my statement that I do this all the time was snickering sarcasm with strong implications of racism. I’m not the one hurling insults, I’m just calling out @Riemann’s. I think I’m justified in resenting that sort of mocking personal attack.
I responded to your reasonable (but I believe incorrect) post in a reasonable manner. If you don’t want to respond, that’s fine.
@wolfpup you have progressively moved your position from one that I would disagree with only in terms of degree, to one that is explicitly one of class superiority. I recognize that you are somehow unaware of how ugly the positions you have recently sketched out sound, but you have left no generous benefit of the doubt open.
First to chew on the culinary metaphor some … the point you obtusely ignore is that mastery of an elitist cuisine does not imbue any mastery of other food styles. Entertainingly enough the hot food ticket in Paris right now is American ‘cue.
FWIW Cordon Bleu has several programs, not all teaching all things. No, learning French pastry does not translate to making great burnt ends.
More to the point, you demonstrate your contempt of the cooking skills of non-elite groups. Contempt that few of the best French chefs would share. I recall specifically reading the chef of the very high end The French Laundry stating that the skill of a chef is shown in their dishes that feature offal. Soul food, peasant food, has always required mastering the techniques that make delicious that which the elite could not be bothered with. That is skill.
This same classist contempt is increasingly made clear in your thoughts about language. This is beyond implicit and structural classism: you have now been explicitly so. It is ugly to read.
I had to smile at that! Once upon a time there was a sheet taped on a door of a research lab I hung out at (as an undergraduate research assistant) that had a list of translations to have in mind when reading. Near the top was that “It’s been said that …” should always be read as “There is zero evidence to believe that ….”
To answer your question btw (and I only counted one) - I have no reason to believe that linguists, or others who have great understanding of the reasons and principles of grammar (of any dialect including but certainly not limited to so called Standard English) have an easier time developing fluency in multiple dialects, any more than I would expect an expert in art theory and history to be skilled creating art, or a scholar of music theory and history to create great works in multiple genres.
Which of course inform naught as to whether speakers of the elitist dialect can easily code switch. I would argue that goes the other way around. Those who are not of the elite have to code switch to succeed among the elite. They have practice at it.
You are a great illustration of the opposite. You cannot even read mild deviations without having to stop and translate. Fluent in other dialects? You?
of
[auxiliary verb](Auxiliary Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster verb)
\ əv, before consonants also ə
Definition of of (Entry 2 of 3)
nonstandard :have —used in place of the contraction 've often in representations of uneducated speech
I know this has already been pointed out to wolfpup, but lets enlist Merriam-Webster to hammer in the point that “of” can be a verb.
That isn’t what I said. I said that “cookery techniques equip a future chef with the basic skills and knowledge to excel at preparing a wide range of foods”; they are likely to be better equipped to approach a new recipe than someone with a narrower skill set, because there are basic principles that apply to almost any style of cooking. It’s not a disparagement of those who haven’t been formally trained, and that reading of my remarks is uncharitable and disingenuous.
Is “I have no reason to believe …” somehow more persuasive than my “it’s been said that …”, of which you were so dismissive? In fact, while the evidence may not be definitive in an area so difficult to study, there certainly have been suggestions that literacy in a first language is beneficial when learning a second:
Being fluent in more than one language contributes to academic success. In fact, supporting the home language builds an important foundation for learning English and for all later learning (Head Start, 2021). One of Cummins’s (1991) conclusions was that researchers agree that bilingual children’s proficiency in L2 is primarily due to their competence in L1 literacy skills before they start learning L2 and that there is a clear relationship between L1 and L2 literacy. https://red.mnstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1740&context=thesis
If they can successfully and fluently code-switch, are they not then – by your own definition of linguistic classism – themselves “of the elite” (whatever that means)?
You’re misrepresenting my description of a subtle mental process that we all engage in when encountering something unexpected or unusual in text. It has absolutely nothing to do with fluency or lack thereof.
In that case what you said was completely unrelated to the point being discussed. If you believe that you are being misunderstood in this thread, well when this many well educated readers all understand you to be taking a position that you do not believe is the one you mean, perhaps you are not as elevated in the hierarchy of language skill as you think?
It is less misleading.
Then you go ahead and switch the bait, again.
A high degree of language fluency in one language facilitate mastery in another. That is true for fluency be it written, spoken, or both, and it does not matter if they became fluent by way of explicitly being taught the rules of grammar, or by way of “osmosis.”
For example, future English language skills or delays among children adopted internationally are strongly correlated with their language achievement in the language of their country of origin. Those skills do not correlate as well with how well they spoke English (or if at all) prior to adoption.
No being able to code switch to the language of the elite does not make one of the elite. It reduces the impact of one structural barrier. No more.
The culinary analogy works reasonably well for literacy. Elite and bourgeoisie dialects are associated with wealthy strata that can provide the most extensive educational opportunities and free time for artistic endeavor; and naturally the most extensive bodies of literature and academic work are associated with those dialects. With regard solely to literacy and literature, there is a grain of truth to your claims. But this does not derive from any intrinsic property of the elite dialects. It is no more fundamental than commenting that they did not build the Large Hadron Collider in Somalia. It’s a reality, but that reality does not derive from some fundamental innate inferiority in Somalians.
But the culinary analogy fails completely when we consider the spoken languages that all humans (even completely illiterate humans with no formal education) instinctively acquire from a young age. There is no parallel “culinary acquisition instinct” in children. All dialects of spoken language have similarly rich and subtle structure, none is objectively better than any other. And this is the thing that so many classist/racist prescriptivists do not grasp. That (for example) AAVE has equally rich structure, and grammatical rules that are just as strict as those of “standard” English. The rules are just different. By “rules” here I mean the structural grammatical principles, not prescriptivist trivia; and by “strict” I mean that native speakers empirically never deviate from them in constructing speech.
But it’s so common for ignorant supremacist prescriptivists to characterize speakers of dialects like AAVE as ignorant, to imagine that what they speak is some imperfect or inferior form of English that education could “correct”. When an AAVE speaker cannot communicate effectively in “standard” English, often with asymmetric competence (understand well, speak poorly), of course this is associated with lack of educational opportunity. But don’t ever imagine that the purpose of such education is to remove “errors” or “inferior” speech patterns in AAVE. The fact is, a native AAVE speaker must learn to code switch into a second dialect if they want the best opportunities to succeed in a world that is dominated by people who speak that other dialect, many of whom are prejudiced against anyone who speaks only AAVE. Learning a second dialect is something a middle class White person never needs to do to succeed.
A way to think about Standard English that I’ve toyed with (or what @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness calls “bourgeonics”) is that Standard English isn’t anyone’s birth language. It’s a lingua franca that currently has status, and so is taught in schools (a clear sign that it’s not a birth language - of the thousands of languages in the world, the vast majority don’t get taught in school or in any formal way - children pick them up naturally). Some people have a birth language close enough to their nation’s Standard English (and there are a half-dozen of those “Standard Englishes”) may not remember being taught to drop their birth language’s characteristics and use the local “Standard English” dialect instead (at least when in formal circumstances), but I certainly remember learning that what sounded like “of” should be written as “have” - and I grew up in middle class America in the 1960s, surrounded by other Americans.
Exactly no one should be surprised that there is a standardized, pluricentric variety of English, which is no one’s native language but everybody here learned in school, whether as a first or as a second, third, etc. language. Compare something like Modern Standard Arabic (whereas two native Arabic speakers from two different countries may be mutually unintelligible).
This extends to the spoken language, too: I know at least one Indian who is perfectly comfortable using Received Pronunciation (the standard) but could hardly understand a word the vendor was saying when she first came to the United States and tried to buy a coke from someone who happened to have a thick Southern accent.
I’ve also read accounts of World English speakers who can converse with each other perfectly well in English (in spite of it not being their native language), but who find Americans difficult or impossible to understand.
