[Glice]

Truncated, have a ball-cup.

On a related note, what I appreciate about internet discussions is that, unlike in real-world conversations, the epithet "You don't understand because you're not black", which could so easily be applied here, holds no water whatsoever because a person's ethnic identity is effectively neutered thanks to anonymity.

Good work, the internet.

*Edit - I didn't read the following posts by Ned at the time of writing, not that it matters...

To continue... I understand there are a lot of issues at play here (more deconstructionist rhetoric)... I'm being fairly partisan so far because I don't really know a lot about ebonics - so far, I can't help but think that the case for it being a foreign language rather than a sociolect is fairly weak. My linguistic theory is rudimentary to say the least, although I have done papers on Sapir/ Whorff, Saussure, Chomsky and Wittgenstein, so I'm not entirely in the dark, but I must admit a certain ignorance.

My overwhelming feeling at the moment is that it is political enterprise to give ebonics cultural clemency rather than a linguistic one. I say this because the large communities of Indian, Pakistani, West Indies, African and Chinese are all expected to learn standard English; all of them have regional variations on English, and (anecdotal evidence here) there is a general way of speaking for most of them (I'm not sure if this is to do with voice or language variations - the first thing that comes to mind is that many people with south Indian families tend to have quite nasal voices).

Um... I'm drifting away from my point... Um... Yes. So. Anyway. Those of African origin generally tend to have lived in a culture in which English is the standard; languages of course change, and new ones come out of old ones - is this the case with ebonics? I feel that it isn't, based on the fact that I can understand black English just as easily as anything else. Admittedly, I have problems with dense Jamaican patois and Nigerian English, but then I would have the same problems for dense Cork accents, thick Glaswegian or, looking elsewhere, I have problems with the syntax of a lot of Eastern European English speakers (Bosnian, Polish) that I know, I also notice that the families I know of Chinese origin tend to speak English, at home (they're fully comprehendable otherwise) incredibly quickly. I don't see, so far, that the case for ebonics is anything more than a political enterprise based on black politics.

Also, it seems to me that we haven't mentioned how diverse a country Africa is - Black, as a term, encompasses so very many things - for instance, a Ghanain (sp?) will (generally speaking) have an entirely different sense of values and culture to a Somalian or a South African - I worry that ebonics seems to clump an incredibly diverse set of people into one bracket, which again, can only be interpreted as a political, not a linguistic enterprise.