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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36940 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The current distance between normal English and African American English isn't an edict of nature, it can be reduced.

None of this is an edict of nature. That's the whole point, and why there isn't one universally correct set of rules.

The statist perspective here is simply wrong. We're talking about a dialect that is already low status in society - you can't regularize it any more by edict because we are already living in that world. The people who speak BVE simply don't care about your approval (although obviously many of them can switch to SAE when they need to).

Many nation building projects included picking one language among many and teaching it to the people of the entire country: France, Italy, Poland... There are still dialects, but the diversity of language in each of these countries has been reduced in comparison to the state before standardization.

And in Germany to this day there are extreme regional differences, even when comparing the vernacular in nearby cities like Dusseldorf and Cologne. Sure, everyone speaks High German too, but just about everyone in the US speaks SAE as well.

I'm glad you brought up Italy because they actually have a hodgepodge of local languages infinitely more bewildering than someone 'axing' you a question. You can't make people completely sever their connection to the language that they heard from their family and parents growing up, even if the high modernist government doesn't speak it.

That's the whole point, and why there isn't one universally correct set of rules.

There is correct English just as there is correct Python or correct French. American Africans (and their "wigger" admirers) who deviate from this ideal are wrong only in so far they claim the language the speak is English.

We're talking about a dialect that is already low status in society

Is it low status? If I mock Ebonics will the elites laugh with me, or pillory me? Because in a country where non-standard dialects really are looked down upon, even far-leftist politicians openly mock them.

you can't regularize it any more by edict because we are already living in that world.

If we lived in a world in which a student speaking correct Ebonics (but wrong English) the teacher would mock them, and would be given 0 points if they answered thusly, I would agree. But today's teachers in America tolerate Ebonics even when it is presented as English.

The people who speak BVE

Do you mean AAVE?

simply don't care about your approval

If they didn't care about approval, in the case of the "lawyer dawg", the Ebonics native speaker would have said it was his insufficient grasp of English that cost him an attorney, and wouldn't have appealed.

I'm glad you brought up Italy because they actually have a hodgepodge of local languages infinitely more bewildering than someone 'axing' you a question.

And if you went to the era before unification of Italy the distance between languages spoken on Italian peninsula would have been even greater. My point wasn't every Italian speaks the same language (I even mentioned that no two people do), but that state intervention can reduce the differences.

There is correct English just as there is correct Python or correct French.

There is no academy of the English language.

There is correct English just as there is correct Python

Which Python version is the correct one?

2.7 obvs

There is correct English just as there is correct Python or correct French.

The comparison to Python is useful. One big project in NLP back in the day was defining a formal grammar for English, analogous to one for a programming language. Countless careers were spent on this paradigm.

That project failed, spectacularly. Human language empirically doesn't follow a formal grammar. All it is is a dense, giant mass of statistical correlations that agents pick up through positive reenforcement through interactions with other agents. Try writing a grammar of English in a couple of megabytes of ANTLR files, and you are doomed to fail.

Of course, you can train some classification model on some subset of English data labeled as proper and the rest improper. But you'll find that the stricter you make it, the more you'll find good and even great English rejected.

There is correct English

Ah, maybe you can clear that up for me. Is the correct English SAE? Or is it British English (RP? Midlands pronunciation? East Anglian?)? Or Scottish English? Or Australian English? Which one is the one true English?

If I mock Ebonics will the elites laugh with me, or pillory me?

Do a few job interviews in Ebonics and see how many offers you get.

My point wasn't every Italian speaks the same language (I even mentioned that no two people do), but that state intervention can reduce the differences.

Indeed, and the differences are already highly reduced. We're litigating 'ask' vs 'aks' in this thread. Try talking to a Sicilian in Ligurian and tell me which difference is larger.

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