Oh... god...

[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.

Comments

[shavedapebaby.livejournal.com]

Thanks. And I'm actually terrible at linguistics. My Master's is in medieval and Renaissance English lit. I've translated Beowulf and Alfred the Great and plowed through Chaucer and that crowd, but it was pure will that got me through it. I am not, as the joke has it, a cunning linguist.