Re: YAEPT alert! [Re: Not phonetic but ___???]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2004 at 12:41:25PM +0300, Steg Belsky wrote:
> As it says on John Cowan's Essentialist Explanations page,
> [Brooklyn Judeo-Syrian-American is] ...essentially Arabic curses and bad
> Ebonics spoken with a Brooklyn accent.
You don't have to resort to essentialism. :)  My wife had a coworker in a
fast food establishment who spoke a dialect of AAE, and mutual
intelligibility with GAE was nil to a pretty good approximation.  When
both she and he were making a conscious effort, they could understand
each other well enough to operate the restaurant - barely.  But when e.g.
he was on the phone with someone else who spoke his 'lect, he might as
well have been speaking Martian for all the sense it made.  (Of course, he
may have been deliberately exaggerating to defeat eavesdropping, but
even so it was hard to imagine that what he was speaking was English.)

-Mark

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