Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 23:29:05 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: Ebonics


Tim W gets it all wrong:

>So we should be in the forefront of efforts to improve the education of Black
>youth.  This means fighting for them to be able to read and to write.  This
>requires abandoning ebonics for standard English.  This is, IMHO, not
>advanced by telling Black youth the slang they presently speech is the equal
>to, perhaps better, than standard English.

The whole point of our discussion here, put in concentrated form by Carrol
C, is that Black English is a mother tongue in its own right, just as much
governed by rules and just as potentially complex in its structure of
meaning as any other mother tongue, whether anointed as the official
language of a state (and backed by an army, cops and fingerwaggers in the
process) or carrying on regardless as a dialect. Before writing, and before
states, all languages were of this second kind. Greek hallowed its dialects
by using one dialect for lyric poetry, another for epic, a third for
history etc.

Linguists know all this. The great breakthroughs in historical linguistics
at the end of the 18th and throughout the 19th century came when the
*spoken* language was given the precedence it requires, and changes as
between the canonical written languages (principally Greek and Latin) were
discovered to *follow* rules in the development of *spoken* languages.
Written languages are derivative and fetishized. Their highest development
comes when the spoken word is at a premium, as a faint fingerprint compared
to a living person. The Ancient Greeks were constantly arguing and
constantly spouting poetry at one another (among other things), the Ancient
Romans were doing the same in both Latin and Greek -- the orators
(particularly famous ones such as Demosthenes and Cicero, to pick a couple
of names out of the hat) were applauded like pop stars for particularly
elegant or striking turns of phrase. Homer's epics were composed for oral
performance. Everyone will have their own favourite examples from various
times and cultures.

Looking at the US today, we see, if we choose to open our eyes, an
incredible vitality of language pouring into "official" English from those
areas of American culture with the most vital spoken and popular
performance traditions -- the Black ones. From Joel Chandler Harris (Bre'r
Rabbit jes lay low an say nothin') to Muhammed Ali (float like a butterfly,
sting like a bee) and on, all the most colourful and memorable turns of
phrase flow from the African rhetorical, spoken, performing tradition. Who
put a million volts into Rock and Roll? Chuck Berry and Little Richard.
Anyone who's heard Chuck B playing slow spiritual music or Little Richard
the pastor doing his preaching act will have no doubt at all in their minds
about the communal, performing, live base and origin of their
communication. The "grammar" is the rules of the community. "I knewed I was
doing my motor good ..." Watch Rikki Lake, or more to the point her
audience and guests, and you'll hear the same vitality, regardless of the
schoolmarms of this world. Mark Twain loved the vernacular, spoken
language, and hated schoolmarms, and did more than anyone to open up
English for the cultural needs of the Age of the Struggle for Socialism.

Tim W is speaking for the schoolmarms of the world in his little piece. The
choice is not either/or, but BOTH. And both in an open relationship of give
and take.

Reading and writing in no way requires abandoning Black English. I'll say
that again.

READING AND WRITING IN NO WAY REQUIRES ABANDONING BLACK ENGLISH.

Or ghetto English, or slum English, or Hispanic English, or immigrant
English or hillbilly English, or Geordie or Irish or Scots, Jummy, or
Cockney or even upper class public school Royalty weirdo English.


Reading and writing means ADDING another couple of registers of acquired
language use to what's there already in your mother tongue.

Tim's argument is like saying, with the Catholic prelates of the Old
Regime, that men can't sing if they don't have their balls cut off.


He also goes over the top in this crackerbarrel headscratching:

>A case could be made that ebonics IS better on a certain level: that is as
>an expression of popular African American culture.  It may possess within it
>a greater warmth and maybe better ways of expressing aspects of the human
>personality than standard English.  Yet it must also be frankly stated that
>it is NOT a separate language, it exists only as a verbal dialect, and one
>must go beyond it to reach the riches of the written heritage of all
>peoples. Black youth deserve nothing less!


*Every* language that is a mother tongue is just a capable as any other of
expressing warmth and any other emotion human beings care to have and
communicate. If you are brought up speaking Standard English, as a few
people occasionally are, you communicate human emotions with it as your
mother tongue.

It must be stated frankly that Black English is a MOTHER TONGUE that
deserves all the respect and support that other mother tongues should get.
Separate has got nothing to do with it. Most dialect speakers use a
continuum of grammatical rules producing at the one extreme very broad
output, almost incomprehensible to outsiders, and at the other output that
is practically indistinguishable from Standard English. The task of
education is to amplify the standard bits when the speaker needs them. It
is possible to produce a grammar of dialect by focusing on the broader end
of the continuum (eg Beryl Bailey's work on Jamaican Creole grammar), but
this abstracts from the continuum mastered by the individual dialect
speaker.

Finally, and very importantly, every natural language is as capable as any
other of scaling the heights of human culture, all have the same
*potential*. Since people communicate what they have to, and what their
cultural needs dictate, an extremely localized community, with brutally
restricted access to major aspects of society and the communication
involved with it, will not have the same opportunities to develop a vast
scientific vocabulary in its language as, say, the rulers will. This also
applies to small state languages in relation to imperialist languages, such
as English, English and English. Linguistic imperialists love to shed
crocodile tears in the Tim W manner (you know, warmth, popular culture and
the rest) and then go on to say how stupid those Swedes, Turks, Finns,
Icelanders, Poles, Vietnamese, you name it, are not to ditch their own
outmoded languages, forget useless sentimentality and start speaking
English. As if learning another language automatically involved losing your
own! It's the other way round. If you don't know your own language, you'll
have trouble learning a new one.

Cheers,

Hugh


PS  There's an excellent little book that gives the basics of the
principles involved in all this as far as language is concerned. It's
called Sociolinguistics -- An introduction to language and society, by
Peter Trudgill (pronounced Trudd guil as in guild, *not* trudgel to rhyme
with cudgel), Penguin Books, new edition 1995. Eight quid, twelve US
dollars.




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