DIALECTS

What do you see?

wolves at play; jaw sparring

wildearth photographs

Yer ears ain't any better than yer eyes. What do you hear?

Something called standard English is taught in American public schools. Most languages have an 'official version' that the government encourages. This is fine. If you're building a house, good to have a solid foundation.

A dialect is usually defined as a variation of the standard language. Not everyone agrees on this definition. The problem has a number of issues. Can a dialect continue to change and become a language? Are dialects 'bad' and standard forms 'good'? If two standard forms are combined, what results?

Ebonics is a term coined to describe to Black English. If Ebonics is considered dialect, as many Caucasians think, then it can be labeled as 'bad'. Bad grammar. Faulty syntax. A vocabulary that seems bent on confusion.

If Ebonics is a language, then it is no more incorrect than French.

Toni Morrison is quite sure it is a language.

It’s terrible to think that a child with five different tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own language.¹

What she refers to is the sense of time in Black English.

Some of the ways to talk about walking²:

• He walk– an action without regard to time
• He is walkin’– an action in the present
• He be walkin’– an action that is done all the time or over and over again
• He been walkin’– an action in the past that took some time
• He done walked – an action completed in the past

Every language has the same problem. The more established the language, the bigger the problem. The less established the language, the more likely it be that 'dialects' will flourish. The French have a government bureau dedicated to purifying the one true language. In Papua New Guinea, a small island nation in the South Pacific, 840 languages are spoken.

Best, it seems , not to be gettin' too dogmatic 'bout yer stuff.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. ³

Toni Morrison

1https://africanamericanenglish.com/2010/05/19/5-present-tenses-of-aae/

2https://abagond.wordpress.com/

3https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html

THE LANGUAGE OF WHALES

Katharine Payne, a student of both music and biology during her undergraduate years, combined those interests to discover and document the songs of humpback whales. Since the late 1960s when this research began, these 'songs' have entered into the realm of common knowledge. This familiarity and a rather egocentric tendency that homo sapiens exhibit towards other species seems to have trivialized whale communication.

Whales have their own language. It is as simple as that. Humans are not unique in their ability to communicate. In fact, an argument can be made that human language, at best, is rather clumsy and inefficient. If one considers end results, all of human history and the current state of the planet provide all the facts anyone might need to make such an argument. The good that has been accomplished by our species seems to have been done by small groups of people working locally, people who have overcome the language barrier.

What evidence is there that whale sounds are no more than the equivalent of our grunts and groans? A discovery by Dr Payne made in 1969 is one piece of the puzzle. She found that whale songs change over time. As winter approaches, all the 'singers' in a particular breeding ground will start singing the previous winter's song. By the end of their migration and the time spent at their feeding ground, these whales will be singing a new song, a very different song. And all the 'singers' in the population will have learned the new song. Obviously, something more complex than grunts and groans is going on here.

Katy Payne asserts that the humpbacks do more than just 'talk'; they are using their language to compose and make their own brand of music.

The salient fact about all communication within and between species (except humans) is that of integration. Whales are one with their environment, perfectly adapted to all contingencies of life at sea; and the same might be said of aardvarks and zebras and everything in between. And though some humans speak disparagingly of nature red in tooth and claw, the relationships between species and with the environment generally is symbiotic. Are there malicious beasts in the jungle? Nasty brutes that prey on the weak simply from some perverse enjoyment of inflicting pain and suffering?

Only homo sapiens. Our language seems, by design, to confuse and confront, to set us apart from one another and from the world around us.

Music, however, does seem to be a different behavior all together. Perhaps the whales are on to something. Perhaps what we all need to do is talk a whole lot less and sing a whole lot more.

Recommended reading:

on the language of elephants

PREPOSITIONS

Ever wonder why dogs circle each other sniffing their hind ends? Obviously, they are looking for errant prepositions. Everyone knows that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition. The rule is etched in stone.

Well, that's what yer 3rd grade language arts teacher would have you believe. I'm here today to tell ya that this rule is not something to bet the farm on. Take Shakespeare's famous line "We are such stuff as dreams are made on". Or, if something more practical is wanted: He is a man you can count on. Those are prepositions at the end of these sentences.

Why do these phrases work and impugn the rule? The general slant is that if the verb is relatively weak and the preposition strong, the preposition belongs at the end. If the opposite is true, the verb goes last.

If Shakespeare's line is held to the rule, it stumbles badly. We are such stuff on which dreams are made. A bit pompous, that. Or: He is a man on whom you can count. Pompous and pedantic.

Many expressions have become idioms simply from long usage. The preposition is at the end, but the preceding word is where the stress lands. Examples are: "Nothing to sneeze at"; "Something to guard against"; " You don't know what I've been through".

Rules aplenty have been penned in an attempt to make the grammar and syntax of language clear. Language, however, is not mathematics. 2 + 2 is always 4; but two and too are homophones.