(Hems and haws.)
Okay – got me there.
Dammit.
I’ll be back!
No, it hasn’t. It was a question about my characterization of one of your posts.
Sure you did.
Me, Post #549:
- “Can speech be lazy?”
You, Post #562:
- “No. Laziness is a character flaw.”
I truly have no idea where you got this from.
“Physician, heal thyself” after you snidely offer me a “quick lesson in logic” is worthy of the moderator’s rebuke?! I don’t think so.
To which assertions are you referring?
A request: you might not be aware of it, but your tone drips with arrogance. Seriously. If you could try to strip your posts of it, I would appreciate it. If you can’t, I accept it, but will no longer reply to you.
If you could cease your reading of what I did not say into what I did say, you wouldn’t be having this problem of seeing arrogance in my posts as there is none there.
You continue to assert things that are not there are really there. I really don’t care if you don’t reply to me as I don’t enjoy discussing things in a debate unless there’s honest debate present. Your methodology does not qualify.
Cite?
I understand these are your beliefs, but if you’re going to post them as assertions, you have to back them up with more than your opinion.
And calling a dialect merely a “regional accent with some local vocabulary” just proves that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Dialects can vary in pronounciation, lexicon, syntax, phonology, pragmatics; the first two might be the most obvious, but they do not a whole dialect make. Before, people gave examples of how the verb “to be” differs in AAE; that is a difference in grammar. Some differences in phonology include rules about when you can delete final consonants. A difference in pragmatics is “Bragadocio,” like when Muhammed Ali said just about anything he’s famous for saying. Those are all differences between AAE and standard English. And that ain’t even the tip of the iceberg.
What do you mean “It’s [AAVE’s] tight relationship to SAE is obvious”? Do you mean that they’re both English?
Careful, liberty! He’ll call you arrogant too.
I’d be more than happy to.
Is Korean an isolate? I read somewhere that it was, and then someone said it wasn’t, and now I just can’t remember who I beleived more…
My personal favorite linguistic myth is that people in Appalachia speak Elizabethan English…
I’ve been called worse.
Korean is an isolate, at least according to what I was taught recently at UCD. A lot of people think that it might be related to Japanese but it’s really not, other than some loan words from Japanese and, of course, the massive amount of loan words that both Japanese and Korean got from Chinese. Other people think both Japanese and Korean might be related to Turkish. Apparently, those folks base their conclusion on these languages being agglutinative.
Funniest thing I ever saw happen regarding the term dialect was when I was visiting my girlfriend of the time in Tokyo, back in 1992. She’s from Zamboanga on Mindanao and thus her native language is actually Spanish. One of her neighbors was from the native Tagalog area of the Philippines. That neighbor said “Zamboanga is a funny dialect of Tagalog, don’t you think?” I really should’ve written down all those cool curse words the girlfriend used in response. The upshot, though, was her asking the neighbor how someone could be so stupid as to consider Spanish to be the dialect of a Tagalog.
should be
It seems that you are so intent in finding fault with what I say that you are merely glimpsing at the words or ignoring their meanings.
First off, I never asserted them to be fact, just opinion. If you will read again what I wrote I think you will see that:
“Here is what I do think: SAE is a dilalect…”
"…dialects I would consider “sister…”
“AAVE seems to fall…”
“From my exposure to it, it seems to be…”
I call your attention to my statement:
“…than other American dialects, which are often simply regional accents with some local vocabulary.”
This was not meant to be a formal definition. To most, that would be obvious. I was merely trying to draw a distinction between dialects falling at opposite ends of the spectrum–where one end is “almost a full-fledged language” and the other is “merely an accent”. I think you know this, yet you still seem to be in a captious mood, continuing to treat this thread as a linguistics classroom.
You might find this helpful in seeing your bias. It’s from The Coumbia Guide to Standard American English.
An accent—whether an American Southern accent or a German or other foreign accent in English—is often just another label for a dialect different from one’s own. In a technical sense, however, accent involves only sound, whereas dialect can involve sound, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.
Before you dive into your keyboard again, please notice the seventh word from the end.
Link: http://www.bartleby.com/68/14/1814.html
I meant they have immense overlap. Would you prefer that I count all the words and other similarities they have in common?
Liberty3701, let’s get one thing straight: You know more about linguistics. You see, there it is in print for the world to see. Maybe the SDMB has some official disignation they can give you. Please look at the OP. Linguistics does play a role in the discussion, and you’ve offered a lot. But perhaps you’d be less frustrated (I know I would) if you started a thread examing the linguistic nuances of whatever you have a pet peeve about.
Either that or code switch. Save the technical linguistic hat for your conference in October. Maybe try to understand the larger points being made instead of looking at every phrase with a linguistic magnifying glass.
If not, I’ll leave you and your pompous, learned friend to pat each other on the back and move on. This thread has probably gone on too long anyway.
Why not take a linguistics issue that is near and dear to your heart and start a thread? Other linguists are bound to find it interesting. And you would have the benefit of an insightful, quick-moving debate with your peers.
The Pit, not Great Debates, is the place for personal insults. Did you not understand that simple rule?
On second thought, this thread HAS gone on too long. For me, anyway.
Thanks for the time. All.
See you in another thread.
I was responding to what I quoted, not to everything you ever said.
I was merely trying to add some insight from my training that I thought would help this debate along. And half the time I honestly didn’t understand your claims
My bias? what, being educated? You can say “can” all you want, but since we’re talking about AAE, I was using those examples. Where you draw the line between dialects is fuzzy.
I’m not allowed to ask an honest question for clarification. I’m sorry if you think it came out snide, but I can’t control your readings.
This is uncalled for. I’m not here to prove how smart I am; I just thought I had something to add to this discussion seeing as I study this stuff. Linguistics doesn’t just play a role in this discussion, it is at the heart of this discussion. With a better understanding of just what is at stake, then the politics and pedagogy can be discussed with some intelligence.
I have tried my hardest not to speak in jargon, because I know it can be obnoxious. And I looked at every phrase because you can’t just throw stuff out there without backing it up. That’s why I joined this board, because you can’t get away with passing off your opinion as fact, and people admit when they were wrong.
I admit it was bad form to have a side conversation, but I was excited to see someone else who shares some of my passions. There’s still no need to call him pompous.
This is a linguistics topic that is near and dear to my heart. Sorry for disagreeing with you.
This thread should have died long ago, because it’s clear we weren’t listening to each other. I’ll admit I don’t know when to stop, but dammit, this is an important topic, and I’ll stand on my soap box till the cows come home if that helps people understand dialects and the importance of diversity.
Bossy! Bo-o-o-o-o-ossy!
- ::: d & r :::*
Don’t make me hit you with my soap box, 'cause I will… 
Liberty3701 I just want to say that I’ve been avidly following this thread. I didn’t have anything to add to it, but what you are saying has been clear to me from the start. You did not use jargon, except at times when you had to in order to say what you mean. Because obviously, you do know what you are talking about, you’ve studied it, you work with it, and clearly you keep up to date in it (conference). I’m not saying that there can be no discussion of the best way to teach code switching (whoo hoo, now I’m using jargon too!), but obviously the participants need to be speaking the same language. And no, that pun wasn’t intended. It would have made for an even more interesting discussion if people on the other side of the question had argued with something to back up their opinions, and surely there must be people who study linguistics who do question the wisdom of the proposal (although I don’t study linguistics and it makes sense to me) because I’ve never known of a profression which didn’t have different schools of thought on matters. So it would have been nice to know why they didn’t think it was such a hot deal, but I guess we’ll never know because nobody in this thread argued from that position. I apologize if this post doesn’t fit the rules of GD, but I thought the thread had just about peter’d out and I could maybe get away with it. Also, I usually don’t gush, but I though you really argued your case well and with integrity. As did Monty, and Tomndebb.
Thank you.
You’re welcome.
Yes, thank you…
I’m kinda sad this debate turned out how it did. I would have liked to have heard more from the opposing side as well, especially when it came to pedagogical questions.