Posted on 07/20/2005 3:05:58 AM PDT by Smile-n-Win
A recent e-mail from a dedicated teacher illustrates a problem that has received far too little attention.
In her kindergarten class was a little black girl who did well except for getting a very obvious question wrong. It turned out that the little girl had no problem with the concepts or the facts but had misinterpreted a word because it sounded like another word that she had heard used at home, where a "black English" dialect was spoken.
Since the teacher was white, she knew that she was running a risk by getting into this issue. Opening this can of worms could result in anything from being called a "racist" to an ugly confrontation at school or in court.
Nevertheless, the teacher told the girl's mother that, unless her daughter learned standard English, her education could suffer and her intelligence might be so under-estimated that she could be falsely labeled subnormal.
(Excerpt) Read more at capmag.com ...
-Eric
I am a full time ESL teacher who also has an extra curricular duty of running a Highland Pipe Band.
The history of so called, " Black English" mentioned in the article is true, that it came with white settlers in the Southern USA.. What the article omitted to say was that the white settlers who spoke precursor " Black English" were Irish and Scottish. Many Irish and Scots intermarried with American natives and Black slaves, many of these Irish and Scots were slaves themselves , or indentured servants.
Why am I posting this arcane bit of linguistic history?
It is because I grew up speaking "Black English" in Canada, being from a blue collar Irish family, and knew that if I wanted to succeed in life as a professional, I would need to master a new form of "higher English."
Like Black folks though, I did not feel good about that
because it meant the language of my birth, which had evolved as a mix between Gaelic and English, was
low, or somehow obscene. Despite being able to express my self in not only American higher English, I learned to speak the Queens English and all forms of address
necessary to appear before a provincial Supreme Court in Canada:
" If m'lord wishes, might he step carefully outside, mi'lords entry way is very icy this day!"
So if a dumb Scots/Irish like me could do that, the only obstacle to all speakers of Black English is the political
correctness issue itself, and the false concept of "historical justice".
Black children, Black English speakers, and Newfoundlanders ( perhaps the most vociferous of black english speakers)need not abandon their native home language, they simply need to enrich themselves with a wider range of language skills.
"Yo' mama! She know ah like yo' moves!" Black English
" I luvs ya like me own fadder, me son, an if ya haul to me
defrigitator, ders a bot'l of Black 'Arse ( Black Horse Beer) a' th' bak" Newfoundlander English
Das it Smile-n-win!
Slainte Math ( gaelic)
You refer only to the article; have you seen Sowell's book on the subject Black Rednecks and White Liberals? I highly recommend it. Highly.You say you teach ESL. In the US or in Canada? You could be of real use in the US. Maybe you could contribute to the narration of an audio disk version of Sowell's book! That would be wonderful!
I am still trying to explain to farmer Brown that a hoe to blacks isnt an instrument to work the garden with.
Interesting...since all I've ever read about Ebonics ("Black English") is that the problem arose from slaves from Africa applying their native interpretations to the language of the Americas...many blacks say that the insistence by some blacks in dropping the "s" at the end of an English language word is a reminent of a few African native language pronunciations, and it's simply become trendy (a social statement, an insistence on a cultural basis to refuse to pronounce words correctly in English in a sort of insistence upon deformity of the language itself due to cultural concerns) to do so now.
As in, saying, "breakfass" instead of "breakfast," and similar.
Additionally, that the "we be going" Ebonic-level expression (and similar) -- versus saying, as proper English requires, "we are going" and/or "we go" -- is also a carryover of how the predominant African native languages were/still are used. Although I'm not as I write this in touch with what African languages were most common among Africans brought as slaves to the Americas centuries ago, but that the issue isn't which language/s but that the method of speaking -- how to express what in spoken words -- was reapplied to English once learned by earlier immigrants and that's how/where the verbal expressions arose (and upon which has later been deemed to be "Ebonics" by some from a cultural perspective, although it's been established that "Ebonics" is a nonsensical term since it represents/defines no language, no dialect, but often nonsense for socio-cultural purposes, most often not well intended).
As to the first point (the dropping of the "t" in pronouncing English language words by some as a cultural mispeak of English)...in earlier England, it was a similar problem that began by "Cockney" mispronunciations, in which they dropped leading "h"s on English words in their speech...saying, most notoriously, "erbs" instead of "herbs."
And "herbs" -- with a hard "h" pronounced -- is the actually proper pronunciation of that word, while saying, "erbs" is incorrect in properly prononced English...it was only the Cockney regional dialect that started the mispronounced use of that word, as with others (given their dropped leading "h"s on words, still in practice today).
Scots and Irish came South and married african slaves????
Too much PC history for you. Not only was that illegal until the mid 20th century, but it was simply not done. Some interbreeding did occur, but there was almost no recorded cases of marriage.
Maybe a "higher history" for you is in order too?
Scots and Irish came South and married african slaves????
Too much PC history for you. Not only was that illegal until the mid 20th century, but it was simply not done. Some interbreeding did occur, but there was almost no recorded cases of marriage.
Maybe a "higher history" for you is in order too?
Ahhhh, you are Phonetician.
Me too.
It is interesting that politics, historical justice,
and political correctness have little to do with the way languages evolve. They seem to have a mind of their own!
I read that French as spoken in Canada is more like the French of the time of the settling of Canada than European French is.A Greek-American friend grew up being told,Which illustrates the natural conservatism of the emigre."Marry a Greek girl." He graduated college and saved a bit of money and gave his mother a trip back to Greece. But time (and WWII) had not passed Greece by, and Greeks were different than she remembered from her childhood.
She returned to America and told her son,
"Marry a Greek-American girl."
IMO, "black English" is "lazy English". It is not cool to sound like a white person. It's the whole back separatist thing; black history, black miss America, well, you get the picture. The liberal democrat controlled school system is afraid to hold blacks accountable for speaking proper English for fear of being called racist.
LOL!
When I was a grad student I was a TA for an intro course. Students had to produce an essay on the week's reading and turn it in on Fridays.
As usual, some students did better than others right out of the box. One in particular though, a black student, had atrocious writing. It was barely even coherent. I had him pegged for an ESL kid. He never spoke in class, so never heard an accent.
Anyway, every week I'd write on his essay to come and see me during office hours. After weeks of asking, he finally did. And guess what? He wasn't ESL at all. He was from Queens. And he was entirely unprepared for university study.
I don't know how this younng man got through school. He could hardly even spell. His teachers utterly failed him at some point, but then he was admitted to a respectable state university.
Sound like a white person? LOL!!!!!!! Jarhead is there anything about black people you like? Please. You've never been to New York have you? Get over yourself.
AFAIK, the same is true of English as well.
Well I shouldn't have used the word,"married."
Many slave owners, slave drivers and Scots/Irish slaves and indentured servants F___ked black slaves and had children who then took their father's Scottish and Irish names.
These folks still formed family groups even if they were not married, centered on the mother. Dad only visited occasionaly for the most part, especially when he wanted a little somethin.
How else would you explain all the black people who have names like " Baily" , " MacGregor" and " MacIntosh" etc.
They did not simply take the names of their slave owners without interbreeding either, because these folks of color with Scots and Irish surnames today generally do not appear to be " pure black" folks. The men are handsome and the women are beautiful, and most of them wrongly deny their Celtic heritage. I do not.
" Black English" is a result of this social/sexual
interchange. This social, sexual, and linguistic mix
happened as a matter of fact, not as a result of political correctness.
I do not observe any form of
political correctness if I can help it.
You are correct. I used the term "married" rather loosely.
It wasn't illegal up North.
Do you sound like a white person ping!
I'd never heard that, but certainly my own logic predicts it.Just as the Greek-American thought of everything new as foreign and held it at arm's length, the Canadian has defined himself as not being American. Meanwhile the Americans were defining themselves as not being British and, just to be different, doing such things as writing dictionaries in which "harbour" is not only pronounced but actually spelled "harbor."
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