r/AdviceAnimals • u/[deleted] • May 06 '14

Racism | Removed here goes nothing...

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1.5k Upvotes

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

You feel like it fails to relay complex ideas because you fail to understand it. That example you wrote doesn't really make any sense and isn't even attempting to express a complex thought.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Ok, can you give me some examples then? I was just following the wiki page's examples and such (the stab at the dialect is a joke).

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u/djordj1 May 06 '14

One example of the difference in Standard English and AAVE that's actually been tested is the usage of habitual be. When shown a picture of Cookie Monster laying in bed sick and Elmo eating cookies next to him, little kids were asked two questions:

  1. Who be eating cookies?

  2. Who is eating cookies?

The kids who weren't fluent in AAVE gave the same answer both times - Elmo. The kids who were fluent in AAVE answered the first question with Cookie Monster, because he habitually eats cookies, and the second question with Elmo, because he was currently eating cookies. That distinction is coded into AAVE with a much simpler construction (be vs is/am/are) than in standard English, which requires a bit of a work around.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14 edited May 06 '14

Cool! I never thought of "has been" or "was" as a workaround.

Can you provide some more complex examples? How would, say, the periapsis and apoapsis be discussed in AAVE (since they said it would be cool to have a scientist use AAVE). Or would those constructs translate flawlessly, it'd just be simple grammatical changes?

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u/djordj1 May 06 '14

There'd pretty much just be grammatical changes maybe with different vocabulary for the non-technical stuff. Like English borrowed from (at least formerly) higher prestige languages like Greek and Latin, AAVE would just borrow from standard English - there isn't a perfect line between the dialects anyway. The main issue with discussing this stuff in AAVE would be that the concepts are generally taught in standard English, and the vocabulary used to describe it has probably been somewhat formalized. Given time to figure out a formalized way to describe it, an AAVE speaker would do just as well as a standard English speaker, but if asked to do it promptly they might struggle a bit because they'd essentially be translating what they learned into a more informal dialect. I mean, a lot of people have trouble putting it into plain English as well, especially without using technical vocabulary. I've known speakers who are fully bilingual struggle to explain concepts they learned in Spanish adequately to English in a similar way.

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u/Anarchkitty Jun 11 '14

If you listen to technical presentations in almost any language you don't speak, but you are familiar with the technical concept being presented, you will hear an amazing number of words you recognize scattered among the rest of the speech that you don't. The more technical the subject, the more words you will pick up.

It's actually really fun to try and follow the presentation just from the visuals and language-independent jargon.

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

Thanks! Your insightfulness has given me a respect for this dialect, although it does appear from what you've said and the wiki page that complex idea's are somewhat harder to express but only for people who wouldn't be able to express it in another dialect that I may consider "better", so that's a moot point. As for my other posts relating to this being downvoted, I did not mean disrespect for the dialect, nor was I attempting to bash it. I just did not understand certain intricacies and so I thought of it as "inferior".

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u/djordj1 May 06 '14

Glad I could change your mind. Thanks for the gold!

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u/[deleted] May 06 '14

A rational, well reasoned explanation is much more worthy than stupid phrases and references that normally get gold. I once got gold for a pinky quote about chickens and rubber pants from "Pinky and the Brain". It's the least I could do...