Yes, there was, but I would hazard to guess slaves had little interaction with the landowning gentry, at least none on a peer-to-peer basis.
What are you talking about? I’m not attempting to prove anything. And before we both start taking the debate down two different paths, please answer this (seriously): Can speech be lazy? If you say no, how would you characterize my speech when I might say “I do’n wanna go to the beach.”
Again, I’m not attempting to prove anything. This is a debate board, not a court room, a mathematical theorem class, or a playground filled with third-graders playing a game of “Gotcha”. I’m offering my opinion, based on personal experience and deliberation. That’s what most of us are doing here. My comment regarding adaptations and shortcuts was not intended to be taken as a law. If it would make more sense to you if I had said "…that changes OFTEN come from two directions: “adaptations” and “shortcuts”, fine. Feek free to attribute my foggy meaning to lazy writing.
Oh boy, a query! I agree that a prestige dialect isn’t necessarily the mother language. But it very well may be. Wouldn’t you agree?
I didn’t think it was bad or lazy, just “alternative”. 
tomndebb Laziness is a moral judgment. And? I can live with recognizing it a widespread problem as long as I don’t belittle, lecture or moralize about it. One needn’t view laziness as being exclusively a moral failing, nor does a lingustic laziness necessarily affect industriousness in every aspect of one’s life. Just because it’s descriptive doesn’t make it an epithet.
But a lack of laziness is a firm indicator of one’s willingness to change and speaks volumes about a student’s potential. Kids who won’t even learn to code-speak will have difficulty competing outside their cultural sphere and won’t be as valued as people who have made a greater effort to communicate in SAE. You can be defiantly lazy or passively lazy, take your pick, but it still denotes a tendency to do as little hard work on your diction (or writing skills) as possible in order to get by. I fail to see how it’s factually wrong, morally wrong or pedagogically bankrupt to note that learning language takes work, and tests scores consistently prove that speakers of AAVE especially in lower socioeconomic classes often don’t do the work needed to master the prestige dialect. It’s not an issue of ability but a lack of will.
Students have plenty of opportunities to be exposed and to accurately practice the prestige dialect. Most of the exposure doesn’t even happen in the 180 days a kid’s supposed to be in school, it happens in the community at large: news outlets, advertising, televison performers, radio DJs, movies, the internet, etc. But the vast majority of African-American geared entertainment, information and influence continually reflects its own dialect – which is not a bad thing, culturally – but there exist few productions where the successful skill of code-switching is utilized and is popular with young people, and that limited exposure to people who look like them using the prestige dialect while embracing the richness of their own dialect does hurt. Gangsta rap is insidiously limiting that way – at least back in the day you could count on hearing a variety of rappers drop knowledge using American English and AAVE with some facility. Maybe the resurgance of open mic poetry can do something about that…
We’re probably not going to see eye-to-eye on the appropriateness of “lazy” but I hope you can respect my observations.
liberty3701. I used “formal language” because I was desperately trying to avoid typing “written language.” We are talking past each other and it’s probrably my fault.
I see this partly as a class issue: in any society, the least valued dialects are used by the poor, the most valued are by the elite classes, and those elite dialects are by default considered widely as “mother tongues,” “formal,” “correct,” “proper languages” – what have you. I can see how an overculture can ignore the patois of a lesser valued one, but not the other way around. Some aspects of the overculture will influence at least some aspects of the dialect of the lesser. It’s probably unavoidable.
Much of the communication in working class households is oral and authoritarian. I was trying to conceive how a dialect can be derived from some aspects of a parent culture --especially blends of languages. The best I could come up with was, “Oral dialects tend to conform more to colloquial expressions and deviate significantly from the formal, standardized forms of the language(s) they are derived.” It might be more accurate to say, “evolved alongside” than “derived.”
Lexicography. Yeesh.
P.S. On PREVIEW: I’m not suggesting they sat down to chat over tea with the landowning gentry, but they had a damn sight more interaction than you’re giving them credit for, which certainly influenced AAVE. Just look at Thomas Jefferson and Sara Hemmings. No African slave came over with names like, “Gabriel,” “Nathaniel,” “Frederick,” “Harriet” – and they certainly never came up with “motherfucker” on their own.
I said on a peer-to-peer basis, ie, as equals. Yeesh. And I’d like a citation that there has been any significant influence on AAE by the dialect of the landowning gentry. You can’t just make assertions like that. We’re not talking about what you name your kids, and we’re not talking about vocabulary shared by most English speakers. We learn our dialect mostly from our peers. For slaves in the Southeastern United States, this would have been other slaves and indentured servants, which tended to be lower-class people from Britain, Ireland, Scottland. Not the landowners.
I would react to the rest of your post, but I have to get going to work. On AAE. Why won’t anyone give me any respect for being an authority on this subject?! 
The problem is that by insisting on dragging the word lazy into the discussion, you are making unfounded moral judgments about other people in an educational context.
An individual teacher, knowing her class and the capabilities and current levels of her students has the right and obligation to point out that a student is "wrong"and can address a student as “lazy” if the teacher knows that the student is ignoring subject matter that has already been learned.
Posting speculation about some unidentified number of vaguely identified group of students speaking in a particular way because they are “lazy” when you have no idea what their actual education is or to which variant of which dialect they may have been exposed is nothing more than idle speculation. Idly speculating about another person’s moral qualities based on your ignorance of their education is factually wrong, morally wrong or pedagogically bankrupt.
In other words, it does not need to be part of the discussion, so inserting it into the discussion is presumptuous.
Dialect. What is lazy about it? Did you grow up hearing your parents, family and peers all saying “I do not want to go to the beach.” with every vowel and consonant enunciated clearly? (I’m going to laugh at you if you claim “yes.”) You speak the way that you learned the language between the ages of nine months and four years. It is not “laziness” to use the phonemes and grammar which one first learned. One does not learn to speak and does not generally learn language in school. One learns the rules of writing and is instructed in the formal dialect so that one can employ code-switching when it is most appropriate.
Now, if you see your natal dialect as laziness in yourself, you are welcome to so identify it. I see no reason to make moral judgments on people based on the speech they learned in their first years of life. Insisting on that dialect in a formal setting when one knows more formal speech may be defiance or laziness or any number of other negative behaviors. However, before I employ a judgment on another person, I prefer to know more about their situation.
And I particularly see no reason to employ broad brush moral judgments against groups of people about whom we do not have sufficient information.
No, they do not. They have some (greater or lesser) opportunity to hear the prestige dialect spoken. However, learning speech requires interaction with other speakers, with a lot of (typically unconscious) corrective behavior by the listeners. Just as white suburban kids can listen to hip-hop radio stations and pick up some mangled catch phrases and a few (often distorted) differently pronounced words, kids whose only connection to SAE is through TV, radio, and movies may learn to understand it, but will not learn to speak it.
There is a tiny black enclave at the edge of my county that is in our school district. (Lots of odd history behind that.) Most of the kids from that neighborhood who are in my kids’ high school classes can code-switch fairly effectively, speaking either AAVE or SAE (with Northeast Ohio inflections) rather easily. However, I knew a couple of those kids from the days when they attended the same pre-school as my kids. At that time, despite Sesame Street and Barney and any number of other media presentations of SAE, they could not speak SAE. They learned it over the years as they attended our overwhelmingly white suburban schools and interacted with fellow students who spoke our regional variant of SAE. A kid who lived in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly AAVE would never learn SAE through the media, any more than my son and daughter have learned AAVE from the radio–which they have not, despite hours of listening.
In some respect, “laziness” can accurately be used to reflect how all humans use language. Words constantly get chopped down, merged, whatever by the population as a whole. But that term does carry unnecessary baggage (lazy = bad), and one could just as easily describe that process as “making the language more efficient”.
But even the “laziness” has its own rules, and doesn’t just blur meanings. Most of us say “I’m **gonna **take the train today” instead of “I’m going to take the train today”, but no one would say “I’m gonna the store to buy some food”. “Gonna” isn’t just equivalent to “going to”, but a new way of expressing future action.
Spelling is a pretty loose concept really. There was no standard English spelling until the Eighteenth century, look at any early text and you’ll see a wide variety of spelling. And certainly standard English has regional variations … I’m an Australian, for me neighbour, centre, programme, theatre and analyse are all correct spelling. If you are an American, they are all incorrect.
liberty3701. You meant “equals” but you typed “peers.” Peers doesn’t always mean your social equals. Peers are grouped in all kinds of ways… age, rank, blood family, co-workers. Me, I’d argue you pick up dialect primarily from whomever you regularly interact with and whomever you decide to consciously emulate and for most of us that includes our peers but not always… I mean, my teachers weren’t my peers. My minister wasn’t my peer. My grandfather’s fishing buddies weren’t my peers. The comic books I devoured were not written in the patois of my peers.
I’m not sure the social classes in America were quite so removed from one another 400 years ago as they are now. Slaveowners had house slaves living in their homes, their children often grew up playing with each other and there’s too many slave narratives mentioning how slaves did, in fact, have sometimes quite extensive and intimate (sometimes loyal) relationships with whites who were at least landowners if not the gentry.
And hey, hey HEY. Point of order. Yeesh is mine, goddammit. Aine no mere “Guest” gonna “Yeesh” me, I don’t care what your expertise is! Get a SDMB subscription already! Why you teasin’ us?
tomndebb. I’m not using unfounded judgments or mere idle speculation. I’m using inductive thinking. I’m making specific observations about student populations I’ve 1) been part of and 2) taught and/or 3) mentored in some fashion for 30, 5 and 10 years respectively and using that information to generalize across similar population groups. I may not have as specific knowledge about their education and motivations as the students right there in my classroom, true dat, but I damn sure have an accurate rough idea about their experiences, attitudes and aspirations and how the world at large works to use inductive reasoning and say, “Those kids aren’t going to make it talking like that.” Granted, I may be factually wrong on a few minor points; I might be, but seriously doubt that I am, morally wrong; but unless you’ve some special insight to educational theory that says “inductive reasoning doesn’t work” and supplants Plato, Horace Green, Piaget, Montessorri and the legendary Pygmalion, I doubt what I’ve done is either pedagogically nor andragogically bankrupt. My little fancies may be untested, but they’re not completely unsound. Let’s not bring that up again.
I agree it was presumptuous; doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear discussing.
I didn’t mean to imply they could master SAE it soley through passive entertainment… but it’s one of the easier ways to internalize the rules. It’s a very, very narrow understanding of AA culture that continues to insist that these students don’t have ample opportunity to practice SAE with their own age school peer group, with student leaders, with mentors, with their teachers, coaches, counselors, clergymen, with pen-pals, with members of their extended families, with strangers on the internet, if they so desired. The opportunities are there. They can. They often don’t. Out of peer pressure, pride, boredom with formal education, frustration, a sense of entitlement, a fear of getting embarrassed, an unwillingness to work on their speech or meet the world halfway or what have you… all of that can be overcome with hard work, perserverance and encouragement, from school and (especially) the home.
I agree, John Mace, I just don’t think “lazy” is need be the perjorative it has been asserted to be. I’m aware of the connotations, and I think they often have merit. I mean, so what? Boo-hoo, I called a whole people’s speech in some respects lazy. Well, dammit, I am African-American who speaks in both AAVE and SAE whenever the mood strikes me and I’m calling a spade a spade. If I can’t characterize the reluctance as laziness, who can?
Ah, I get it now, magellan. You’re not trying to prove anything; you’re merely tossing out charges–inaccurate assertions, actually–and expecting the rest of us to accept them willy nilly.
just for the record, the definition of peer: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=peer
“A person who has equal standing with another or others, as in rank, class, or age”
Not that I’m a dictionary prescritpivist or anything…
You make a really good point here, but I would still argue against saying that the language of the land-owning gentry had any substantial influence on the development of AAE. There’s just no proof of it.
The standard of “proof” around here almost always goes back to book/newspaper/magazine/journal/authorized website citations and prevailing theories in academic research. Now… sometimes I play that way, and other times I like to just mull over stuff and go, “Well, okay, but what about this and this?”
Opinions = charges?
Points you disagree with = inaccurate assertions?
Unproven claims = invalid positions?
Huh?
Now, instead of trying, and failing to be cute, why don’t you answer the questions I asked?
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Can speech be lazy? If you say no, how would you characterize my speech when I might say “I do’n wanna go to the beach.”
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I agree that a prestige dialect isn’t necessarily the mother language. But it very well may be. Wouldn’t you agree?
In order to continue the debate in a serious manner–as you requested–I asked for clarification on two of your positions. If you’d like to supply the clarifications and continue, fine. If you’d rather not, that’s fine, too. Your call.
I don’t see how Askia is making a moral judgement merely by using the term “lazy” (as I have). I certainly see how it could imply a moral judgement, unfound or not, but I don’t think it is a necessary connotation of the word.
Not surprisingly, I see it from the other side: Here we are on a message board–not in a classroom where a child may be offended–and still, every time I or someone else uses “lazy” in a descripitive, morally benign sense, people on the other side of the debate insist that the word is necessarily loaded. It’s not.
I agree with your last point. But I still don’t see how describing something as lazy, if, in fact, the description is accurate, is a moral judgement. I classify my “gonna” the Italian-American/Tony Soprano “fuhgeddaboutit!”, the AAVE “S’up” as lazy speech. Where’s the moral judgement?
I think your observations are right on.
As an aside, I would say that it would be difficult getting a kid who did have lazy speech to embrace SAE by saying, “Okay Johnny, now how would you say that in a less efficient manner?”
I do not see where the word lazy can have anything other than a moral judgment.
It might be a matter of a “mild” judgment, but I know of no context (other than the popular name for amblyopia) where “lazy” is not a moral judgment. It is always a declaration that a person has deliberately failed to exercise due energy in an exercise. It is held up as one of the seven deadly sins. It is a reason for being cut from the squad in sports.
In what context is lazy ever not a moral judgment?
(And, as I have already pointed out, I do not think your expression in natal dialect is lazy unless you are employing it in a formal context; it is the way you learned to speak, long before you entered school.)
For one, when one’s “failure” has not been deliberate. We tell kids to “sit up straight” (lazy posture) and “don’t shuffle your feet when you walk” (lazy gate(?)) Most of the time kids just aren’t paying attention. Give them a reminder and they sit up, lift their feet when they walk, and say “I want to” instead of “I wanna”. I recall being reminded an awful lot.
I would say that when the failure is becomes more deliberate, it ceases beiing lazy and moves in to the realm defiant. You alluded to this very loosely in your post #539, a response to Askia regarding the failure to code switch.
tomndebb.
- Being lazy is a failing, I’ll grant you that, but I suspect it can have meanings and implications beyond the merely moral, although that’s probrably as far as some people might care to look. But dig deeper. Laziness in speech might stem from social failings (not being socialized or expected to communicate with a wide variety of people), a physical failing (lack of proper nutrition, sleep or adequate health diet can make children sluggish, indolent and unwilling to learn), or a psychological failing (being chronically shy or fearful of embarassment could mean a child just isn’t comfortable making mistakes interacting in a new dialect and acts out defiantly) – just to throw out three possibilities.
Even if it didn’t mean anything but moral implications – so the fuck what? We’re expected to teach and uphold values in schools and stress the importance of effort, due diligence and hard work. Being lazy is a refusal to work hard, and laziness for whatever reason – even from psychological disorders like oppositional defiant behavior – doesn’t cut it in school. If you can’t work hard to master language for whatever reason, society will write you off as a lazy fuck. Maybe it’s not even entirely your fault (gotta blame the environment for some of this) but there ya go.
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Actually, if I remember my SHAZAM correctly, sloth is one of the Seven Deadly sins, not lazy. Lazy is not precisely synonymous with sloth because … well, for lack of a better explanation, slothfulness seems more intense and more pervasive than mere laziness. Maybe that’s just me, though. Then again, “Lazy” doesn’t have a slow moving animal named after it.
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Yes, but only an immature mental infant sticks to a natal dialect all their life in all kinmds of situations, tomndebb. I said dooky when I was a kid, and I grew out of that.
Heh. Dooky.
magellan01. Nah. Laziness borne of defiance is still laziness. It takes a lot of fucking energy to be willfully defiant – I can’t imagine NOT putting that energy towards trying to do what’s asked of you unless there’s a more compelling fear, hatred or disdain holding you back from applying yourself.
“Not being socialized” (i.e., ignorance) is laziness?
Inadequate nutrition is laziness?
Psychological trauma is laziness?
I’m sorry. You use the word in ways that I cannot even conceive.
But failing to maintain posture is a deliberate failing. It is choosing to not pay attention when it is expected.
And unless you can show me a person who grew up hearing only “I want to,” then “I wanna” is only laziness in specific situations where “I want to” has been explicitly shown to be the desired pronunciation. If you tell your spouse “I wanna beer,” you are not being lazy, you are quite carefully speaking the dialect you learned as a child rather than choosing to speak a formal and unnatural dialect reserved for special occasions.
I have already made this point, both explicitly and by implication, but let me reiterate it in case you two have missed it.
If a kid has already demonstrated the ability to execute code-switching in speech, then I have no problem with having a teacher demand that the formal code be used in the classroom and I do not even have a problem with the teacher pointing out to a student who has demonstrated it that failing to execute the proper code-switching may, indeed, be a sign of laziness in the classroom.
The problem I see is that it appears that each of you are willing to tell some kid who has not yet grasped the concept of code-switching that he or she is lazy, or worse, to describe some large group of kids who may not even have been exposed to code-switching as lazy. Dialect is not laziness and branding as lazy kids for failure to execute perfect code-switching is not a useful method of education.