Re: CHAT: Ebonic Xmass

At 01:02 13/01/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Speaking of Ebonics, for my freshman comp class, I had my students read an
>essay about "black English."  I was amazed at the reaction I got from
>students: "It's just bad English -- it's not a dialect."  So we discussed
>what made English "right" and what made it "wrong."  I pointed out that I
>would never say, "Hey, Prof, what's up?  Dude, this test was a b----!" nor
>would I ever say to one of my friends, "Pardon me, but could you please
>bring me another beverage?"  Then I wrote a sentence in Old English on the
>board, and asked "Is this good English?"  I felt like I was pulling teeth
>-- I could not convey the idea that language is *constructed* by social
>agreement, not innate.  Finally, I gave up, and I had a student (who had
>never said a word to me in class or out) come up to me and say, "Mr. Dunn,
>I just wanted to say thanks for assigning that.  It's nice to see that the
>way my family talks isn't just wrong."
>
        It seems so near to my personal experience! I always have this problem
too. Moreover, as I'm not a teacher, people don't see the point of me
explaining that and they're just exasperated by me. The biggest problem I
generally have is when people complain that something "is not pronounced as
it is written" as if a language was first a written thing that was to be
pronounced, whereas it's in fact the contrary. And when I try to explain
that it's the word that is not written as it is pronounced, and not the
contrary, and that the written part is only a representation of the spoken
language and thus can be imperfect, they look at me as if I had insulted
them... Well, I generally just cannot find the right words to explain what
I mean also.

>Okay, that had no real point, I guess.  Just a fuzzy moment in teaching.
>I love my job, what can I say?  :)
>
        Same for me: I have a passion for language, what can I say? :)

>--Patrick
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

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