Re: THEORY: free variation [was: Re: [OT] Re: Conlangea Dreaming]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> Marcus Smith wrote:
> > Then
> > there's the famous [tometo] vs. [tomato] song, extendable to [poteto] vs.
> > [potato].
>
> Isn't it /p@teto/ vs. /p@tAto/?  And then there's always /t@peto/.  ;-)
> (Jocular varient used by some people I know)
>
> But anyway, the classic example is rhoticism in many dialects, where the
> *same* speakers will say both /fO/ and /fOr/ (or is the vowel /o/?).
> That's free variation.  The potato example is simply a dialectal
> variation.  Most individuals use one or the other.
Oh, that reminds me!  I was listening to some people speaking ebonics
yesterday.  How amazing!  I think I actually detected variation in vowel
length.  For example:

dOr --> do: (or maybe dau)

I still don't completely get the verb system though.  "She was knocking"
is apparently simple past, not past progressive.  "I be knocking" I'm not
sure of.  Simple present?  Present progressive?  Why that form of "be"?
Is there a conjugated "be" with different meaning?

I'd love to sit down with a speaker of Ebonics and listen to it, but my
students are terrified to use it with me.  I guess they suspect that I'll
tell them to speak proper English, whatever that is.

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