posted
I wouldn't assume you were being wise (getting smart with me), Dan. You said I should take it up with someone who defined it differently than I do, IIRC....
I meant pretty much that I define it differently,and that I don't agree with that narrow definition. My wife doesn't, either.
I know a lot of non-black people who speak with an inner city dialect/accent, and they aren't doing it to look cool or to pretend to be something they aren't. If you heard my sister in law , Jenni's sister, speak you'd never know that she was so white she makes Casper the Ghost look like he has a tan. It isn't about race, it is about socio-economic status.
She is college educated, intelligent, and was raised in the same household as Jenni was, but they don't sound alike at all.
Jenni's sister lives with and associates with people who are poor, live in government housing projects, and are less educated than most of us. Her kids, all of whom are very smart, speak that way as well, and they are half Hispanic, not black. But you couldn't tell that listening to them.
Is there a racial component to that type of speech? Yes.
But race doesn't even begin to describe at least 30% of the people who speak similarly. So I'd hardly call it a racial dialect these days. I'd call it an inner city dialect.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: No, illegal aliens do not have the right to vote, in any state. Voter fraud, Mal, is a crime.
This man speaks the truth.
It is federally illegal but if a state registers you to vote for presenting a library card.....who's breaking the law?
Well, if you are an illegal alien and you try to vote, you are breaking the law. It's not a grey area. Amsterdam, not being America, has nothing whatever to do with it.
Posts: 79 | Registered: Jan 2009
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posted
"But race doesn't even begin to describe at least 30% of the people who speak similarly. So I'd hardly call it a racial dialect these days. I'd call it an inner city dialect."
Trade one blunt piece of terminology for an equally useless euphemism, fine. You can at least agree it's more complex than geography- more complex even than economic status or education, but that would at least be closer.
quote:The "requirements" aren't necessarilly backed up by "proof". Although WA has a requirement that you are a citizen, an electric bill is proof of residency. They automatically assume that if you are a local resident, you are a resident of the nation. An electric bill gets you a drivers license and a voter's registration card
That is simply not true. To get a driver's license in WA you must produce proof of identity, a SS# and proof of washington state residency. You keep omitting those first two items.
That said, last time I registered to vote, I wasn't even asked to show ID of any kind let alone proof of citizenship. It wouldn't be very difficult to vote fraudulently in the US, but I haven't seen any evidence the voter fraud is at all wide spread and certainly none that it has been a deciding factor in elections.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
I might note that when we normally use the phrase "X dialect", we don't normally mean that X describes the people that currently use the dialect, merely where the dialect came from.
For example, lots of people in Hong Kong speak the Cantonese dialect. That doesn't necessarily mean that they are from Canton, thats just where the dialect historically originated from.
Similarly, saying that Ebonics is a "negro* dialect" shouldn't really mean that the dialect is only used by black people, but that it originally came from them.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: I wouldn't assume you were being wise (getting smart with me), Dan. You said I should take it up with someone who defined it differently than I do, IIRC....
I meant pretty much that I define it differently,and that I don't agree with that narrow definition. My wife doesn't, either.
I know a lot of non-black people who speak with an inner city dialect/accent, and they aren't doing it to look cool or to pretend to be something they aren't. If you heard my sister in law , Jenni's sister, speak you'd never know that she was so white she makes Casper the Ghost look like he has a tan. It isn't about race, it is about socio-economic status.
She is college educated, intelligent, and was raised in the same household as Jenni was, but they don't sound alike at all.
Jenni's sister lives with and associates with people who are poor, live in government housing projects, and are less educated than most of us. Her kids, all of whom are very smart, speak that way as well, and they are half Hispanic, not black. But you couldn't tell that listening to them.
Is there a racial component to that type of speech? Yes.
But race doesn't even begin to describe at least 30% of the people who speak similarly. So I'd hardly call it a racial dialect these days. I'd call it an inner city dialect.
Aha! I think we might be talking past each other slightly, then.
Basically, I was just commenting on Mal's use of the term "Negro Dialect," which many people think is offensive. I was trying to offer some clarity, in that I am almost positive Mal was using the phrase with his tongue in his cheek, as a reference to Harry Reid's gaffe with that term.
From his comment the conversation has turned to legitimate discussion of "negro dialect" as ebonics and what that entails. That's awesome, and an interesting line of discussion, but one that I had nothing valuable to add. So, I was going back to the beginning, rather than joining in on the current topic.
Does that make sense?
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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You said I should take it up with someone who defined it differently than I do, IIRC....
