Re: AAVE aspect markers

Quoting Eamon Graham <robertg@...>:

> Morgan Palaeo Associates wrote:
> >
> > I've never heard of Gullah before (not surprising, you probably have
> > to be American) but a quick search of the Conlang archives turns up a
> > few matches, so that's OK.
>
> When I studied in Charleston, SC I had the great fortune of reading
> an excellent book on the survival of African linguistic traits in
> Gullah with a fairly large lexicon and discussion of phonology.  I
> took notes, so if anyone was every interested let me know.  The name
> of the book escapes me at the moment.
Although such claims of links to African languages have some
credible foundation, they are very frequently pushed too far,
often for political reasons.  The main problem associated with
them is that in most of the American colonies, there were
never large concentrations of speakers sharing the same African
language family, much less the same language. An ancillary
problem is that the proponents of these theories try to compare
the creoles that later developed with Standard English, which
is curious since standardization didn't begin to happen in
English until Mr. Johnson came around with his dictionary in
1755, and large slave populations were already in place well
before that date. Here is a good essay that deals with some
of these issues:

<http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/mufwene/gurt99.html>

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