languages (Ebonics) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

9 Mar 2000

There are a few characteristics, not necessarily ones of which the Black
community is proud, which certainly are traceable to one-time African tribal
culture.  A few moments with a stack of police blotters will show that
there's a really noticeable tendency among Hispanics to "burgle" outside
their own community, while it appears quite common that a Black man will
steal his neighbor's TV-set, only to invite the victim and his family to
come over to watch the game at his house.

I've read/heard that this is traceable to ancient and still-practiced custom
in various west African cultures.  However, I'd not recommend doing that in
THIS society.  That tendency to ignore the realities of life within the
present culture, both legal and ethnic, is purported to have arisen as a
defense against burglary charges on more than one occasion.

Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: John Wilson &lt;wilson(a)dbit.dbit.com&gt;
To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt;
Date: Thursday, March 09, 2000 1:13 PM
Subject: Re: languages (Ebonics)

...
 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 