just have a question.
WTF was a snob like you doing at Walmart ?
Purchasing a frame for your death certificate.
Fraggle Rocker:
Who's going to make the obvious joke that only a "lower-class" person would be in a Wal-Mart in the first place in order to hear that?
I'll up you one: who's going to make the obvious joke about the old man who can't walk because he thought his cane was for wagging?
I doubt that, had we not butted heads in
this thread and had I not pointed out an obvious stupidity you regurgitated on the Hopi language, that you'd even be here with that condescending tone you're trying to use on my person.
Here you are being a total S.O.B. about S.O.V:
It most certainly is not. We're most familiar with the Indo-European languages, which derive from a common ancestor. The structure of the Semitic languages is somewhat familiar too; this may be a coincidence, or perhaps their proximity has resulted in a Sprachbund. But other languages present a much different view of the universe. Our languages have a subject-verb-object syntax, and we consider it a major difference if it happens to be subject-object-verb
....completely misunderstanding what I'm saying here.
You're so busy primping and fussing over the colorful ribbons the human brain ties around language, that you can't even tell its a box with something far more interesting inside.
I most certainly
am not saying that all languages are grammatically identical as that is clearly idiotic: You'd have to read an entire sentence in German to find the verb dangling on the end like an afterthought, or you could smash dozens of nouns together, as in Sanskrit, to indicate number as opposed to the typical suffix of 's' we use in English to pluralize nouns.
Here's an insane one in German:
"Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz "
And no, that's not a tapeworm, its the German word for, of all things:
"Beef labeling regulation and delegation of supervision law"
(And don't ask me to spellcheck that, I'm transcribing notes here.)
Or you could, if I recall correctly, suffer the rote memorization of about 150 noun endings in Lithuanian
just to decline a regular noun even though that poor language has less noun cases than most.
Pardon the babble, but the subject of language has this tendency of flaring some diode I've no idea how to control.
Ahem.
You can also, by the mere sound of air pulsing through the lungs, communicate a desire to fuck the very entrails out of someone when all you really wanted was to comment on his grass in Chinese using the low dipping tone for "Cao"
So read the entire thread, Mr. Fraggle, and put the fucking cane down: I'm stating that the thing inside this little box we call language, all wrapped up with the suffocating flourish of grammar and people like you wagging their fingers and walking canes, is identical in function no matter what culture is speaking it.
Hence, the comparative metaphor of a stomach digesting food.
That there isn't a
single existence of humanity anytime or anywhere that did not codify a means of expressing complex thought;
That
all languages, from the lowliest pidgin to the loftiest European dialect, articulate a means to describe invisible entities, abstract ideas, and are obsessively compelled to describe who is doing what to whom and where;
That
all languages resemble each other in that compulsion to organize movement and time;
And that there isn't a
single language historically or presently that fails in complexity or structure to another one the way the same speaker's tools or innovations fail to those of more advanced cultures-- in other words, that there is no "Stone Age" languages the way there are "Stone Age" tools;
That there is
none of the above, then this tells me there is something happening in the human brain that is identical no matter what nation, class, caste, or age the person belongs to.
This is Pinker quoting Edward Sapir, and I think it says it quite beautifully:
"When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the headhunting savage of Assam." -- The language Instinct, p. 27
Huh??? You're not speaking for linguists, sociologists, or any community of scholars I can think of.
Is that so.
Wasn't it you going around correcting people's posts around here?
Not to mention, lumping "slang" and "poor language" together manifests either a lack of understanding of some pretty basic concepts of linguistics, or else a flouting of those concepts. You're setting yourself outside the universe of discourse on this board, either deliberately or by lack of knowledge.
Does it now?
I'm not going to pretend we don't cringe at the sound of 'bad English" and, like Professor Higgins, are conditioned to believe what dregs of society are associated with it.
Not to mention the look on your face in the presence of stupidity slopping its way through a language expressing everything you don't believe in.
So don't give me cant about setting myself "outside the universe of discourse on this board", darling.
Human arrogance is an equal opportunity employer-- and this includes you.
No. Laymen usually call it "Black English," but as someone explained already, linguists refer to it as "African-American Vernacular English."
Ah, you mean like in here:
"African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—also called African American English; less precisely Black English, Black Vernacular,
Black English Vernacular (BEV), or Black Vernacular English (BVE)"
Or is this another case of you wagging?
It's not slang; it's a dialect.
Allright.
One might argue that it's really a cant, a language variant crafted consciously by a community in order to thwart understanding by outsiders, like Shelta. But unlike Shelta they make no secret of it and we're all welcome to use it, so it doesn't really qualify as a cant.
You most certainly cannot.
What you can, however, argue is that this was just a case of you wanting to drive your new "Shelta" Porsche around in my thread, as this 'Shelta' word is a novelty you've recently acquired in some other thread and like all new, useless things you feel a need to use them becuase, well, its new.
Your new 'Shelta' schtick reminds me of NASA trying to find useless 'new' ways of using the International Space Station they paid so much money for.
We picture a monkey named Mona with a Vaseline filled suppository pinched in her rectum a decade from now because NASA has just decided we need to 'study' the effects of grease on the simian colon in zero gravity.
Government employees once coined the name Ebonics for AAVE. It is still used in some schools and other government agencies.
Really?
Robert Williams, a black psychology professor from Washington university was a government employee? Well, lets see:
Robert Lee Williams II is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology and African and Afro-American Studies[1] at the Washington University in St. Louis and a prominent figure in the history of African-American Psychology. He is well known as a stalwart critic of racial and cultural biases in IQ testing, for coining the word “Ebonics” in 1973, and for developing the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity. He has published more than sixty professional articles and several books. He was a founding member of the Association of Black Psychologists, and served as its second President.
Who is a 'government employee?'
Creole is not primitive language. It's a blend of two or more existing languages, with its own phonetic and grammatical rules
They're all primitive in the sense that they lack the nationalism we call 'standard".
I love the way linguist Max Wenrich put it-- language is a dialect with a navy and an army.
No. It's a way of saying that "creole" is a whole category of languages rather than a single language. Haitian Creole, Mauritian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, Seychellois Creole, Belizean Kriol, Liberian Kreyol, etc.
And how exactly does this differ from what I said?
We don't say
an English or
a Russian.
And how exactly is this different from what Gendanken said:
"Creole, like pidgin, is a classification, not a language. "