9 Mar
2000
9 Mar
'00
5:55 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 10:55:38AM -0800, sjm wrote:
BEV follows strict rules of grammar and word use, and
has syntactic
roots in several major west African languages like Ewe, Iwo,
and Yoruba. It really is not gibberish at all, no matter how
"wrong" it sounds to a native Standard American English speaker
(me included). In some ways, it actually allows much finer grained
shades of meaning than SAE does.
I'd love to see an example of this! What really catches my attention is
when someone begins a sentence with "know what I'm saying?", there's a
lot
of stuff like that that's really annoyingly meaningless. Also I'm not
sure how much can really be traced to Africa, since a lot of this stuff
really seems to have only cropped up in the past few generations. Ahhhh,
what ever happened to Jive? Now *that* was fun to listen to! Ehh, I mean,
that was a thing to which it was fun to listen. Never mind...
John Wilson
D Bit