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

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Monday, April 19, 2004, 10:40
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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Ph. D. <phild@...>