Ok, I was out of line Sample_the_Dog, I was being a prick, and was way over the top. I am sorry for being an ass.
Yes, thanks. And why not?
<reaches for KY, searches naughty folders in favorites menu>
I saw an interesting show on PBS Wednesday about this. Here’s a link: Do You Speak American?. I think it’s important for everyone to at least have some knowledge of commonly accepted English. I have no problem with the use of informal English at home; however, if I were to hire a receptionist or an assistant, I certainly wouldn’t hire someone who would use words like “ain’t,” “yo,” “dude,” and such with my clients.
I don’t think that people who can’t speak maintstream English are stupid by any means; however, I think that it makes them sound uneducated and makes them much less likely to get a decent job or get into college (if that is what they choose) down the road. They actually have a program in some L.A. schools that teaches kids how to use mainstream English (i.e., instead of saying “ain’t nobody here,” saying “nobody is here”).
oops! Another post-lag! :eek:
Thanks, Epi. All’s well. No harm no foul.
I am glad you are good with it. I am a bit harder on myself though. My outbreak shows a serious deficiency of character. I suppose those pillars are in ruins.
Ain’t nothin’ you can’t rebuild. 
In the interest of preserving the hamsters’ health, I’m going to stuff several replies into one post.
Actually, you can chalk that one up to inattentiveness brought on by the earliness of the hour and a lack of sleep. Also, Gaudere’s Law spares no man.
Look back at what I actually typed. I presented improper language usage as a possible indicator of willful stupidity. Let me try to clarify what I mean, by way of a real-world example:
I once saw Judge Judy correct some guy for saying something to the effect of “Me and John went to a party”. She insisted that he use the correct structure of “John and I”, which he did – exactly once – before slipping right back into “Me and John” until corrected again. Being in a formal, courtroom situation, with the judge insisting that he use proper grammar, and still refusing to do so? That, my friends, is willful stupidity.
And were I paying closer attention to what I was writing (as I would have been if I were writing for a class [or if I weren’t half-asleep while writing]), I wouldn’t’ve used it. And (yes, I know that you shouldn’t begin a sentence with ‘and’) therein lies part of my point. I know that a particular construction is wrong, and I normally take special care to avoid using it. My beef is with people who either don’t know that their usage is non-standard (in which case I can only hope that someone educates them), or who know, but still insist on using it in situations where it is inappropriate. The former would be ignorant. The latter, stupid.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who says “ain’t” or “They was” is stupid. It might be an entirely appropriate way to speak in a given situation. My problem is with people who don’t understand (or don’t care) that some situations require more formal English than others.
I hate to do this, but I’m afraid I have to correct you on this point. It is perfectly acceptable to use “that” instead of “who” to introduce a restrictive relative clause.
I’ve taught this particular grammar lesson many times, but you don’t need to take my word for it. Here’s a cite.
Now, I know more about formal, textbook grammar than many people because I’ve worked teaching English as a foreign language. When learning a foreign language, it’s important for people to understand the grammar so they can make themselves understood. However, it’s also important for them to be able to speak to others without sounding like they only learned English from a formal grammar textbook! Again, the point is to make yourself understood, not to follow some arbitrary set of rules. If the “rule” sounds awkward to native speakers and is not commonly followed in speech, it’s a rule best unlearned.
Some people in this thread (not you, Shayna) have attempted to argue that textbook grammar is the only way to go and that only pretty stupid kids wouldn’t notice that they didn’t use the same grammar in speaking that appeared in their textbooks. Well, I think it takes a pretty stupid person not to notice that people do not speak the same way that they write, and that NO native English speaker sounds just like a formal grammar textbook.
In all fairness, though, as an indicator of willful stupidity, it pales in comparison to actually appearing on Judge Judy.
Or, possibly, watching it.
You are changing the topic (although you may not realize it). I addressed the issue of speech and referred explicitly to the given example of people who were televised speaking.
You are now addressing the issues of the written text. I defy either of you to present an example of a school in the U.S. where children are taught grammatical speech, as opposed to grammatical writing, to the exclusion of dialectal usage. Most teachers will address errors in spoken grammar if it is egregiously separated from the local dialect, but only “immigrant” teachers (a Bostonian teaching in Indianapolis or a Savannah native teaching in Biloxi) is liable to attempt to “correct” the actual speech of students for every sentence a student utters. If you wish to assert that the overwhelming majority of students in the U.S. are taught to write following basic stylistic norms, I will agree with you. Claiming that that specific line of teaching will transfer from the written to spoken expression simply displays an ignorance of how language is communicated and learned.
(BTW, while I am aware that Received English is Brit, I used it because there is no corresponding phrase for American English other than references to the Chicago broadcast school. “Standard English” refers to written English, not spoken. Use of “Standard English” supports your confusion of spoken and written language forms, but it is not a better term for the spoken form under discussion.)
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No. What you would then have would be an idiolect–a language proper only to a particular speaker, from the same root as idiot, a person who, appropriately, can only possess his own knowledge.
What makes it’s way into the prescriptivist grammars are the dialects of the wealthiest or most educated people. (Decriptivist grammars attempt to actually understand how language is genuinely used.) Prescriptivist grammars provide a service by presenting the language held by the powerful in ways that allow those with less power to emulate it and thus gain access to that power. There is nothing wrong with that object and I do not oppose precriptivist grammar; either as published or as taught to children. The distinction I make is in pretending that attributing “correctness” to power allows people to foolishly belive that there is an inherent “correctness” that does not exist. There are a few billion speakers of English in the world. There are probably a couple of hundred thousand speakers of Oxonian. The notion that the only people who are speaking correctly are a tiny minority of all the speakers is pretty absurd on the face of it and is doubly foolish under any dispassionate investigation of the topic.
I was. I distinctly remember my elementary school teachers having a large poster on one wall of the classroom that listed five or ten spoken mistakes that the students were told to avoid. If the teacher caught us saying one of the words or grammatical errors listed on the board, we were given a check mark. Part of our grade was based on how many check marks we had - the goal was not to have any check marks.
Very many of the “bad words” were from the local dialect. I recall some of the “bad words” including:
- we weren’t allowed to drop the final “ing” sound. For example, nothin’ instead of nothing.
- we weren’t allowed to use “eh” on the end of a sentence. Really! This was one of the harder ones to drop.
- No use of the word “ain’t”
- no double negatives. “I ain’t go no” was REALLY bad.
Those are the ones I remember. There must have been more, as I remember the list changing and it was up all the time.
And yet, half of the rules that you remember are rules of pronunciation, not grammar.
I also suspect that the rules that were enforced were those that violated the local dialect, rather than all the rules that could be found in a prescriptivist grammar.
For example, the persecution of the final “eh” was simply tension between teachers attempting to impose “American” speech patterns on children with a strong Canadian influence. (I still find myself ending questions with “eh” every once in a while. We trolls only tend to place it at the end of questions while Canadians and Yupers often place it at the end of sentences.)
Similarly, the dropping of the final “ng” was not particularly native to Michigan and was an expression adopted from several of the later immigrant groups.
Double negatives are a serious bugaboo in a number of dialects and they are ruthlessly stamped out when they are imported from an “invasive” dialect. Note that my claim was that grammar would only be enforced in speech when it violated local dialect. Double negatives (for example) were imported to Michigan by immigrants from Poland and Kentucky (among other places) and they do not tend to be an example of typical Michigan dialect.
It looks as though children (at least some of them) in L.A. have been taught grammatical speaking for quite some time:
Standard English Proficiency Program.
There’s another such program in Illinois: link.
There are several others in a variety of locations: link, most of them on the coasts or in the southwest.
overlyverbose, your Oakland link looks promising, (although I did not see a specific refeence to speech rather than text), but your next two links address teaching English as a Second Language (with the first of the two links expressly identifying the children as coming from foreign language backgrounds). Is there any indication that the children in Urbana, for example, are going to be corrected on their spoken grammar as long as they do not violate the speech patterns of central Illinois?
Hopefully this is a better link for the Oakland information: link. It’s kind of a long story, but, from what I understand, the Oakland school system, in 1997, began teaching English as though it were a second language to black American students. They system accepted Ebonics as a “genetically-based” language, so they began to teach standard English as though it were a second language. Anyway, here’s some information on Ebonics, for what it’s worth: link. I wasn’t aware of the sheer numbers of Ebonics “languages” around. If you check out the “Other descriptions” section, it’ll provide you with links to information about all the other forms of Ebonics. In the “classroom tips” section, there is advice from teachers to other teachers on how to teach children to speak, read and understand mainstream American English.
Sorry for ESL links - for some reason I thought they were LEP (limited english proficiency), which is a set of programs that have been strengthened by the No Child Left Behind Act (theoretically anyway - I have yet to see a whole lot strengthened by that act, but that’s just me), and targets not only immigrant students, but any student who has problems speaking English in a way that is understandable to anyone.
Poor Oakland’s 1997 modification to their original plan was so badly handled that even Jesse Jackson came out and blasted them on the topic.
Nevertheless, you are right that there have been a few attempts to teach some speakers of American dialects a more common variety of English and my declaration was hyperbolic and too absolute.
However, even with those attempts, I would be very surprised to discover that aside from teaching middle-class white local dialect in place of urban dialect, there was any effort to teach speech that matched the rigors of written English, or a spoken dialect matching either Oxonian or Chicago broadcast.
Kids in Pittsburgh and Akron are simply not corrected to change “I’m going store” to “I’m going to the store” because the former construction is prevalent in that region. Simiilar grammatical “errors” are going to be tolerated throughout the country.
FWIW, Oakland’s “Ebonics” fiasco had very little to do with linguistics and a lot to do with money. The funding structure pegged federal dollars to ESL/LEP enrollment levels. By classifying native English speakers as non-native English speakers, the school system could improve its financial situation. Their intentions may have been good, but… well, we know about good intentions.
Sorry I don’t have a cite at the moment. If no one else can provide one, I can hunt.
To name three from my own experience, Holy Comforter, Charlottesville, VA; St Barnabas, Northfield Center, OH; and Our Lady of the Wayside, Arlington Heights, IL. You were allowed an accent but not a dialect, thank you very much. But that was thirty-five to forty-five years ago and times change but it explains why my spoken language can be as stilted my written.
Bro, I tend to defer to you with topics on which you seem to know your stuff but you stompin’ around in MY hood, now! Standard English, be it American, British, Australian, or whatever, is both spoken and written with minimal local variation beyond accent. This is why a BBC announcer can be understood in Swaziland and an Indian textbook on invertebrates can be read in Chicago. Your statement that “‘Standard English’ refers to written English, not spoken,” is incorrect, you descriptivist swine!
You’ve said that several times but would you care to provide a citation or two?
I had not realized that. Sometimes I wish I were a little older than I am, especially when I’m arguing stuff like this. (I’m 29, but I was in college at the time, so I didn’t really pay attention to anything going on in the world outside my campus, unless it was archaeology-related.)
I did a few searches, and came up with the following links:
Link 1. This is an essay by a professor of English at University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He argues that he thinks what Oakland was trying to do was admirable, but that the methods they proposed were lacking.
Link 2. This is the amended resolution by the Oakland School Board regarding its policies on teaching standard English as a second language.
I found a few other articles that touched on the scandal briefly and found, for the most part, the problem people had was with English being taught as a second language. Lots of people thought it was absurd, that Ebonics couldn’t possibly be a language in and of itself, and that sparked a lot of cries of racism, yet both sides saw the need for teachers to be able to communicate with their students.
By way of a brief hijack, even though I am a linguistics Master, I was completely unaware of the use of “Lavender Language,” which is described as “the unique language shared by people of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning (LGBTQ) community.” It’s times like these that I wish I had used my masters degree instead of going into writing.