The DEA is looking for Ebonics linguists
According to one posting, the linguist’s duties would include “monitoring varying numbers of communications intercepts during any given shift” and then providing “reliable and accurate transcriptions.”
I heard a morning radio guy scoffing about this. “It’s not a language!”.
Having taken the class, I can tell you the definition of “another language”. To wit:
If you can’t understand it, it’s a foreign language.
Oh, technically it might be “cant” or “argot” – secret languages or agglomerations of jargon designed to keep outsiders out and insiders in the loop, like “thieves cant” or Cockney argot. It might even be “dialect”, a regional or social variation of a language that might be impenetrable to the rest of the language’s speakers (like Schwäbisch is to Germans or highland Scots, or Cajun are to many English speakers).
Still – if people are talking, and you can’t understand them, and understanding them is important, then it’s a language.
But here’s where this is going to turn into a problem:
An agency official, said there is nothing “racial” about the job, and described white rapper Eminem as “one of the best speakers of Ebonics there ever was.”
And so it will be considered a racial thing. and officialdom will crack down on it.
Eminem? Shoooot – let’s not forget Barbara Billingsley.
Word up G. That’s what jumped to my mind too…
No, no! She spoke Jive. That’s completely different.
You’d know that if you weren’t such culturally insensitive RACISTS.
She spoke Jive
Jive is to Ebonics as Middle English is to modern English.
True dat.
Lost in the debate is the question of why, in a nation bound together by print media for the past 200 years, and radio and TV for the past 50-80 years, we’re still developing dialects reminiscent of the mini-fiefdoms of Germany under the Holy Roman Empire.
And, ahem, the question of whether a west coast speaker of “Ebonics” would understand the East Coast or Chicago versions.
And finally, of course, exactly how are “Ebonics” speakers getting through school? Lots of interesting questions about how, ahem, our government still consigns blacks to a plantation far more difficult to escape than those written about by Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass–not to mention more brutal in many ways.
“Whatchu talkin’ about, Willis?!”
I be down wid it, long as dey ain’t teachin it in no public schoolz.
exactly how are “Ebonics” speakers getting through school?
Because they can speak English just fine, they just choose not to sometimes.
they can speak English just fine…
That’s a huge generalization.
It varies widely. Just as it does with southerners, Scots and New Yorkers.
Och, the Scots! I was with a group of Anglos last summer in Spain as part of a program to help Spanish-speakers improve their English skills for business. Among our Anglos were three Scots, and between accent, idiom and diction it was impossible to understand them unless THEY wanted you to understand them — even if you were an Anglo!
Let’s just say they are not all Sean Connery.
When moseying around Europe in 1983, there were exactly two times I was stumped by the local language. Not in France, mind you – a language I’d never studied (as if), but my year each of Latin and Spanish at least got me started. Not in Germany – I was in the middle of minoring in the language – or the Netherlands, which is about halfway between German and English anyway.
No, the two times were in Schwaben, “Swabia”, where the “Schwabisch” dialect – inscrutable even to non-Schwabisch Germans – completely bumfuzzled me. And in Edinburgh, where I had to do something I’d not done in Amsterdam, Cologne, Paris or Basel; ask the guy to repeat himself. Four times. And still had not the foggiest clue what he was saying.
I once had a client who spoke what seemed to be English but his accent was so thick that I had a very hard time understanding him.
I finally worked up the nerve to tell him I couldn’t understand him & I asked him where he was from. He said “Glasgow, raised in Birmingham” (I think).
Imagine an astrophysics grad student who sounded like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LJw6PAi5Q8
Then you can all imagine what I had to deal with in attempting to mediate a discussion about an electrical issue conducted over 2-way radio in the Canadian Arctic between (a) an Italian millwright who spoke English as a second language, (which he learned in Australia) and (b) a Serbian (or Croat, I forget) Diesel Mechanic who spoke some sort of pidgin that he learned God knows where.
The DEA might want to talk to these strange birds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8f3kbQL0kU&feature=player_embedded