Oh... god...
Aug. 14th, 2004 01:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
http://www.alternet.org/rights/19553/
Dialects are variants of established languages. Pidgins are amalgams of two languages. English is a pidgin. In the 14th century English storytellers, notably Chaucer, decided to fuse French, the language of the Norman conquerors of Britain, with the common Anglo-Saxon language (itself a pidgin of two Germanic languages).
Firstly, I'm not sure that theory holds true. HOWEVER, even if it did, English would STILL not be a pidgin. Pidgins are truly "primitive" languages, incomplete. A language like English could be a creole, but never a pidgin, because pidgins have no native speakers. As soon as they have native speakers, those speakers develop things like complex grammar, and the language is no longer a pidgin. It's a creole.
African Americans, especially from the South, have family get-togethers that can include many hundreds of participants. They, too, according to AfricanAmerican friends, speak two kinds of English. Yet, the attempt by many African Americans to get Ebonics, a dialect of English, recognized as a valid language failed because Ebonics is a private, not a public, language
AAVE (African American Vernacular English) certainly occurs in public, or else nobody would know about it. He's actually saying people only use this inside the home?
*sighs* Basics, people, basics.
Dialects are variants of established languages. Pidgins are amalgams of two languages. English is a pidgin. In the 14th century English storytellers, notably Chaucer, decided to fuse French, the language of the Norman conquerors of Britain, with the common Anglo-Saxon language (itself a pidgin of two Germanic languages).
Firstly, I'm not sure that theory holds true. HOWEVER, even if it did, English would STILL not be a pidgin. Pidgins are truly "primitive" languages, incomplete. A language like English could be a creole, but never a pidgin, because pidgins have no native speakers. As soon as they have native speakers, those speakers develop things like complex grammar, and the language is no longer a pidgin. It's a creole.
African Americans, especially from the South, have family get-togethers that can include many hundreds of participants. They, too, according to AfricanAmerican friends, speak two kinds of English. Yet, the attempt by many African Americans to get Ebonics, a dialect of English, recognized as a valid language failed because Ebonics is a private, not a public, language
AAVE (African American Vernacular English) certainly occurs in public, or else nobody would know about it. He's actually saying people only use this inside the home?
*sighs* Basics, people, basics.
