So here's the dilemma:
I hate bad grammar.
Despise it.
My ears burn at the common, linguistic strabismus of people modifying verbs with adjectives, and nouns with adverbs, e.g.: You're doing that good (burn) as opposed to You're doing it well
To boot, like all self-respecting snobs, I've always abhorred slang most of all, specifically what linguists call Black English Vernacular, or what I call "Black Yak".
We associate slang and poor language with savagery and the subhuman.
Yet is it true that the lower middle class of which blacks comprise a large percentage are less educated, and therefore have more "primitive" languages like the creoles and pidgins and slang of phonetic slop pouring out their mouths when they speak?
I'm beginning to doubt-- here's a sentence I heard today at the Wal Mart:
"He be lyin', ain't it?"
Impulsively, it sounds like a crude, almost alien grammar yet look at it: it has both a subject and a verb in the correct order, the 'it' recursively referring to the subject of 'he'.
The speaker would never put the verb 'be' between the prepostion and the indirect object, but has appropriately placed it following the subject.
This person is still subconsciously following systematic rules identical to contraction rules of the verb "is" or "am", as in He's or I'm.
She would never say:
"He be lying, ain't?"
In the same way, a more "refined" or "educated" person would never say
"He's lying, isn't?"
Here's another: the negative concord of saying "You ain't got no ass" is identical to the negative concord of the French "ne pas", and you can also find an inversion of a subject and its auxiliary like here:
"Don't nobody know"
In what is a called a "nondeclarative statement".
Yet we 'normal', more 'educated' people do the exact thing, inverting the subject of a sentence with its auxiliary, but only in question form as in:
"Doesn't anybody know?"
To put it succinctly-- having read countless theories on the instinct of language, an inner language 'machine' that like a machine can create the same product millions of ways but only within the strict confines of one, unifying method.....how can we possibly say black slang, or any "crude" form of language, like pidgins or creoles, is inferior to standard, grammatically "correct" language?
They're built almost exactly the same way.
I'm almost tempted to retire all my inherent disdain.
Then again, you see something like :
So, which is it?
I hate bad grammar.
Despise it.
My ears burn at the common, linguistic strabismus of people modifying verbs with adjectives, and nouns with adverbs, e.g.: You're doing that good (burn) as opposed to You're doing it well
To boot, like all self-respecting snobs, I've always abhorred slang most of all, specifically what linguists call Black English Vernacular, or what I call "Black Yak".
We associate slang and poor language with savagery and the subhuman.
Yet is it true that the lower middle class of which blacks comprise a large percentage are less educated, and therefore have more "primitive" languages like the creoles and pidgins and slang of phonetic slop pouring out their mouths when they speak?
I'm beginning to doubt-- here's a sentence I heard today at the Wal Mart:
"He be lyin', ain't it?"
Impulsively, it sounds like a crude, almost alien grammar yet look at it: it has both a subject and a verb in the correct order, the 'it' recursively referring to the subject of 'he'.
The speaker would never put the verb 'be' between the prepostion and the indirect object, but has appropriately placed it following the subject.
This person is still subconsciously following systematic rules identical to contraction rules of the verb "is" or "am", as in He's or I'm.
She would never say:
"He be lying, ain't?"
In the same way, a more "refined" or "educated" person would never say
"He's lying, isn't?"
Here's another: the negative concord of saying "You ain't got no ass" is identical to the negative concord of the French "ne pas", and you can also find an inversion of a subject and its auxiliary like here:
"Don't nobody know"
In what is a called a "nondeclarative statement".
Yet we 'normal', more 'educated' people do the exact thing, inverting the subject of a sentence with its auxiliary, but only in question form as in:
"Doesn't anybody know?"
To put it succinctly-- having read countless theories on the instinct of language, an inner language 'machine' that like a machine can create the same product millions of ways but only within the strict confines of one, unifying method.....how can we possibly say black slang, or any "crude" form of language, like pidgins or creoles, is inferior to standard, grammatically "correct" language?
They're built almost exactly the same way.
I'm almost tempted to retire all my inherent disdain.
Then again, you see something like :

So, which is it?
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