Today is just my day for losing friends...

[conuly]

1. I'm not a nice person. Nice seems to mean something like not saying what's true just because others disagree, or lying because other people have sensitive feelings and don't want the truth when they ask questions. I don't do that. I don't *like* doing that, I don't *want* to do that, and I'm not *going* to do that. So don't call me nice.
2.

I can't believe you are saying that standard English is a fancy dialect, and that most people consider it condescending to use it. That is just nonsense, not to mention the fact that you would look and sound like a total idiot changing the way you talk to fit every group and region you happen to find yourself in. Talk about condescending! I'd love to see how well that would go over with "most people."

A. Well, we weren't discussing English, if you're curious, and SAE *is* just another dialect. This isn't really the important part.

B. Nonsense? I don't know. It certainly fits in with my experience, where my manner of speech (standard english) was mocked behind my back (but where I could hear, don't you love it?) and where I got accused of being "snotty" for speaking the way I did. Well, not me usually. But other people who spoke the way I did, in real life and in books and on TV, I heard them all the time being called "snotty" and "show-offy" and "snobby" and, yes "condescending". I still hear that. I don't know what world you're living in that you don't hear this, but you're lucky. I hear it all the time. Did I say yet that I *hate* linguistic prejudice?

C. Well, *most* people change the way they talk to fit in with various groups. This is called code-switching. My mom, her coworker speaks Standard English at work, but Jamaican English on the phone talking to her family. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke a form of AAVE in some situations, and SAE in others. We've got recordings of this. My sister Lizziey, sometimes she speaks with a Southern accent, other times with a black accent, other times with a hispanic accent, other times with a Brooklyn accent, and sometimes like a Valley girl. This is all unconscious, but she's good at it. Most people don't speak the same way at home as they do at work. People *change* how they speak depending on the situation. It's all very interesting.

And then she said she's sure I'm very nice (gah!) and unfriended me. You'd think I'd insulted her religion! Well, in a way, maybe I did. But this is *important*.

Edit: And I'm still not nice. I answer questions truthfully, or not at all. You have been warned.

Comments

[conuly]

I know better than to insult an actual religion, but this... I guess that's my blindness, isn't it? I can see why people believe in deities and follow religions, even if I couldn't ever attach that to myself, and so I see why it's not fair to just attack somebody's religion (though it's no holds barred if they're being hypocrites), but this... I can't see it. Why would somebody need to believe something that's not true when it comes to language? And I see it all the time.

One time, I was talking to this girl about ASL. And she's apparently a native speaker, and she said that English is better because you can write English, but you can't write ASL. That's not true. There's at least one writing system for sign languages, possibly two. So I pointed this out to her. I provided a link. And she got mad at me, even showing me her "attempt at writing ASL" (really just a crude gloss of ASL into English) to prove that ASL couldn't be written. And it's her own language, and she had to believe that you can't write it, that English is better in that respect. Very sad, really.

Whee, ramble!

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

Hrm! OK, you just lost me when describing what she did there, but I think I get the idea.

See, now THAT'S a "language" I want to learn...ASL. I hadn't really thought of it as a language until you (of all people, 'surprise, surprise') mentioned it as one.

And don't comment to ME about rambling! I'm a prime rambler too, you know. ;-)
(just a sudden random-ish note: I've discovered I'm very likely to use ";-)" in informal typed communication, but I VERY seldom ever wink at anyone!)

[conuly]

Hm. Okay, I don't speak ASL, so I won't try, but I can give an example of the "crude gloss".

Let's take a simple Latin sentence. One of the first ones we were taught in school, in fact: Maria Annam occidit.

This means "Mary killed Anne".

That is a translation. If I wanted to gloss it, I'd do something like

Mary-subj Anne-obj killed.

thus turning a perfectly reasonable sentence into English mush. That's really *not* grammatical, since the rules of English grammar state that verbs go before objects.

That's kinda what she did with her sign language. She put down words in English, but ASL doesn't really work the way English does, the grammar is all different, some words have a larger syntactic area (they have two or more English definitions) others a smaller one (two or more words can be used where English only has one option), that sort of thing. So *of course* it doesn't gloss well, you end up either leaving stuff out or, as I did, adding grammatical markers to the ends of words. And that was a *simple* sentence!

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

OK, I get it. :-)

This is also making me want even more to learn more Spanish. My "Spanish" teacher was actually from Cuba, so her dialect shone through along with what the textbook taught. Most of the "Spanish" speakers here are of Mexican or Cuban descent, and generally it's close enough if I were to learn one or the other (or pieces of both).

If this were a perfect world, people would all speak the same language, but it's actually very interesting to hear other languages, since I find some of them to sound very fluid and "poetic" compared to English. We would also perhaps lose "code languages" between friends and societies who would prefer their conversations and writings not be easily interpreted by others. I write my pen-and-ink journal ramblings in "Symbol Font" for that reason. I've amused people with it on several occasions when they see that I'm writing something in "jibberish."

[conuly]

You write in Symbols?

COOL!

As for your perfect world, I don't think that's so perfect. I *like* variety. But maybe an auxlang, a good one, wouldn't be a bad idea. Honestly, I wouldn't mind Standard English, even, if people could just rid themselves of the idea that it's *correct* English or *good* English or *better* English.

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

Yes, if you were to type a journal entry (or painstakingly write one by hand) in the Symbol font, I could read it without use of the chart or cheat by "copy-paste."

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

Bah, it didn't work, and my typing is faltering. :-p

[conuly]

To me too! *grins*

I mean, I saw your reply, but I must reply properly.

[genepool23.livejournal.com]

For some strange reason, even though I haven't really seen the font before, that is completely legible to me as well.

I guess because some of the letter forms are close to the roman, and the rest is easy enough to fill in by guesswork.

Ha ha, I can read your secrets!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Greek letters; interesting. Yeah, they're legible to me as well.

[pyrokinesis.livejournal.com]

Heh. I wanted to write nasty things about my boss one day at work, so I made up my own alphabet for it. To this day, I even have a "Feurrstriker" font on my computer so I can type it if I like. ^_^

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Something to keep in mind: no matter how fancy and arcane-looking a font or symbol-system one uses, if it's used as a simple cipher it can be deciphered pretty quickly and easily. (A simple cipher is when there's a symbol for each letter of the alphabet, like 1=A, 2=B, etcetera.)

If you want to make a writing-system that can't be so easily deciphered, the simplest method is to go phonetic - assign separate symbols to separate sounds, rather than to separate letters. It's most important to do that with the vowels, because the first step in deciphering is locating the vowels - easy enough if there's only five of them (and sometimes y), but suppose there are ten or twenty? After all, why should the same letter A be used in the words pat, part and pate, when it doesn't sound the same?

Having separate symbols for all the vowel-sounds does something else: it eliminates silent vowels. Pat and pate become two three-symbol words, the middle symbol of which is different.This alone is enough to screw up most amateur decoders, but there's a third step one can take, which really does the trick: alter the spacing between words. One easy way to do this is to make all one- or two-letter words part of the word they either precede or follow, so essentially there ARE no one- or two-letter words.

*grins* For over 35 years I've written my Deepest Darkest Secrets in a rune-system so abstruse that I have no fear that anyone will ever read it. I've never written the key to it down anywhere, or told anyone; it'll go to my grave with me - then if anyone wants to beat their head against the notebooks full of strange scribbles I've left behind, they're quite welcome, but I doubt they'll have any success.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

ASL is actually very interesting, and as someone who can't think in another language, I must say it's quite freeing for me. It's the only language I've been able to learn other than English, because all i have to remember is hand-movements which go with English words. The few concepts in ASL that don't map exactly to a single English concept^*, I learn by rote; but there's only a few of them, which makes it much easier on balance. I can still *think* in English and speak ASL at the same time.

^* For example, the sign "Do-what?" which translates roughly to "What did you do/are you doing/will you do?" or, if another person is indicated, "What did he do/is he doing/will he do?"