Listen here Mr Grumpy Butt, I didn't say I thought it was stupid, I just asked why.
You should give the Baron lessons in expressing anger with more charm.
Why? Except those who like to complain about things, but do nothing to change anything. All talk, all complaints, that's all it is.
Huh? There is a small army of linguists racing the clock to learn these languages and preserve them. But it's a daunting task for only a small army. Since the majority of taxpayers are like you and don't value other cultures, more money goes into subsidies for corporate tobacco plantations than grants for linguistics.
Like I said, I have as much cultural heritage as you do. I care about my own very much, as I said.
You don't have as much cultural heritage as either Sam or me, if you place so little value on other cultures. Culture is recursive; to be "cultured" includes being curious about the way other people do things, always alert for something they do better, something we could borrow. Or something that is just interesting.
is this why ebonics needs to be saved and taught in schools?
Obviously a dialect of a language is not as important as an entire language, from some cosmic perspective. It is not as rich a trove of motifs since it shares far more of them with its co-dialects and with the "standard" dialect than even the closest-related languages do such as Czech and Slovak or Danish and Norwegian. But they're still worth studying and people do study them. More to the point of your question, no 20th century dialect of American English will be "lost" even if people stop speaking it, because there are a zillion recordings of it in writing, film, music, etc. Anyone who wants to look for an elusive motif in Ebonics in the 25th century can just go to the "rap music" files in the Galactic Library.
So then Cajun isn't a language either? Its just French not spoken properly?
I haven't seen a ruling on that from the Linguistic Council of Elders. But I personally would call it a dialect of French. When you consider that
petit is pronounced
p'ti, the Cajun pronunciation
ti is not very different. The fact that they just go ahead and spell it that way makes their dialect seem more different from French French than it really is. I don't know of any study that put a Frenchman and a Cajun together to see if they learned to understand each other with only a little effort, the way a person from Beijing and one from Sichuan always do. My marginally educated guess is that they would, since anglophones armed only with high school French have puzzled out the lyrics to zydeco songs.
As to it being "French not spoken properly," that's a judgment call that linguists should avoid. Brits say we don't speak English properly even though if it came to a vote we'd win if we could overcome our traditional apathy about elections. "Proper speaking" is ephemeral and a matter of perspective. If Elizabeth II could meet Elizabeth I, she would call her language lower-class and "improper." A dialect is a language spoken
differently. You have to drill down pretty close to the level of an
idiolect, the language of a single person, before you dare call it "improper."
