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

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

Blah, ah well. You've actually managed to get me thinking about things I don't normally think about. You would have to very much offend me by saying something VERY insulting, like calling me stupid for being a Christian or saying that the notion of a God is bullshit (which two 'net friends strongly implied once, and they were also otherwise difficult to associate with, so I "dropped" contact with them). I take your rantings on issues like this as a blunt philosophical debate, not as an attack on myself. I'm oversensitive, and some other people are too, but in different areas concerning different people.

When I visit my dad's family or my husband's family, I've noticed that I switch a little bit to blend in with their styles of speech. I tend to sound more "me" than "them," of course, but I come home realizing I've picked up some interesting drawls and contractions. I eventually lose those within a day or two.

Occasionally I find myself suddenly talking (in fun) like my dad's family does, but I make a point not to make it annoying for others to hear me. Usually if I "force" it, it sounds even "worse" than their drawl. If I hear my aunt Frances (or anyone in Dad's family) say "Lookit all those PUUUURTY FLAIRS!" I know what she means, but I think my ears would snap if I heard anyone else say it. *LOL*

[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!

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

I actually think you are a nice person.
Being nice doesn't mean you have to agree with people when they are wrong.
To me, nice means having manners and not being mean and you certainly fulfill those criteria.
Standing up for something you feel passionate about is not being 'not nice'(mind blank on the word I want there-- read my most recent post for clarification).

I admire you and think your morals, ethics & manners are very good.
Anyone that expects you to agree, simply to pander to them, on a subject you are obviously well-versed is simply illogical.


I've learned a lot from you, Connie, don't ever change.

[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]

I'm not *changing*. I'm just not *nice* as a lot of people define it.

And that was the second friend lost over this, though the first one had other things going on, and didn't just storm off in a huff. Makes me feel better, though I was kinda irked, this was *right* after I wrote my essay on the history of the English language.

[fjorab-teke.livejournal.com]

I know this seems pointless, but I strongly agree with this. :-)

[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.

[scarletdemon.livejournal.com]

People are crazy, I don't bother too much what they think/do unless they're really close to me.

Someone unfriended me on Christmas Eve, which I THINK was because I headed an entry "Merry Christmas". Fuck him, it's his loss. Or maybe he just got sick of me...Im which case I'm better off without him.

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

Oh & just to prove your point, I came from a family that was uppermiddleclass australian & spoke almost flawless upperclassUKenglish with a little edinbugh scots thrown in thanks to my Nanna.

I moved to a rural town in Queensland, Australia & managed to learn localfamilyforgenerations Queenslander & to swear like a trooper to fit in because they all felt I was a snob before I did so.

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

You're 'nice' as most intelligent people define it.

[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]

I'm not too upset. I actually friended this person because of an argument we had over prescriptivism, so it was fated. But... gah, the comment I got just annoyed me.

*blinks*

Unfriended for a holiday greeting. That's jsut *stupid*. Or he got sick of you, it happens. I mean. People get sick of other people, not people get sick of you. Usually.

Um. I'm going to go now... *hops off, foot in mouth*

[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. ^_^

[conuly]

Well, I really *don't* tend to define it that way.

There's a history behind this...

*dreamy flashback sequence*

Y'see, way back when, my first exposure to online life (chatting) was on I&S. Good ol' Insane and Strange. And somehow I became mindnumbingly popular there. I don't know *how*, considering that my favorite pastime was going around correcting people's spelling. I maintained, as I did this, that this is what *I* liked, for my mistakes to be called out so I'd stop making this. And some people would get irritated and call me "mene", especially if I noted that they were scamming others as I corrected their spelling. But my friends backed me up, because, after all, I corrected *everybodys* spelling, right?

Sooner or later, one of the naysayers would correct me. And I'd thank them. And this would *really* piss them off. How *dare* I not be upset when they corrected me! And they'd accuse me of being "mean" (note spelling).

So... wait, I had a point. Oh yeah. I'm mean.

[conuly]

*nods* It happens.

[conuly]

To me too! *grins*

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

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

So(& I'm being literalruthfulaspie here & would appreciate if you did likewise because I do seem to be having trouble masking atm) you don't really think you're mean, right?

I think you're smarter than that.

[farraige.livejournal.com]

>>This is called code-switching.

Uh, no. 'Code-switching' describes lexical variation between two different languages; it is frequently heard in the speech of linguistic minorities as they pepper their sentences with English words (without altering the phonoloty or morphology, because that'd already be borrowing).

[conuly]

*laughs*

I don't think I'm inherantly mean or nice. Sometimes, when correcting "spelling" (it was chtspk) I was really doing it out of a sense of maliciousness than an actual desire to be helpful. That was mean. Usually, though, I really don't think I'm nice. I think I'm caring, to those I care about, and generally benevolent to everyone else, and that I don't hate people (too much energy), but nice really is a vague word. I try not to define myself with vague words.

[conuly]

Both my sociolinguistics text and my sociolinguistics professor define it also as switching between two different dialects. A "code" is defined as "a language or a variety of a language". We were using Wardhaugh's "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics" (4th edition). The definition is first seen on page 87. Yes, I have the book in front of me.

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

Um... ok.

Maybe I equate benevolent with nice.
Not a bad thing.

[conuly]

The book goes on to say that very few people (with the exception of young children, new speakers of the language, and possibly people with certain linguistic impairments) are single code speakers.