I think he's better off not presenting it as "their english" vs "our english" or anything like that. Dialects aren't really a new thing. Italian has a lot of dialects, some of which are more like a separate language. Speakers who are concerned about social class essentially become bilingual. It's not a big deal, really. They call the common language "proper Italian," presumably without anyone ranting about the horrors of linguistic prescription.

So our love of racism and hatred of intellectualism gets in the way of kids learning how to pronounce three letter words. God bless America!

Saying they're both equally accurate because of something hundreds of years ago is a facile explanation.

After all, the switch to ax is a relatively recent change. It's not like people are going, Well our Old English ancestors said aksian so if we say ax it's the same!

The idea that what they are speaking is "incorrect" is a fucking joke. You know what you're talking about, but I don't think I saw anybody in that video that seemed to know much about linguistics. I don't disagree with offering lessons in what is considered "standard" English, but it is racial, and always has been racial, since the invasion of the Normans.

At least the pointed out that most of the issues aren't racial. Cause they're not. African American Vernacular English, or Black-Accented English, or whatever you call it, is not really a racial issue at all in the States. It's an accent of both geography and class. Tons of poor whites in the South sound exactly like that.

And there's a very real prestige issue. But this guy's teaching is absolutely horrible. You can't teach kids to switch sounds they've been making in a certain order their entirely lives. And the way he treats the issue, which is important but incredibly complicated, is both ridiculous and useless. What he's trying to do is great. How he's doing it is pointless.

"Saying they're both equally accurate because of something hundreds of years ago is a facile explanation. "

You see, there was this thing called slavery and then this other thing called segregation... I'm not arguing that saying ax isn't hurting their chances of working at Goldman Sachs, I'm saying that it's because their ancestors were taught English by colloquial English speakers that thought it was correct that they slip into it so naturally, and that should be taken into account as part of the rich and fascinating history of words, rather than simply labeling them as idiots.

Wow, baleen gets pompous about posts he only half-understands. Must be a weekday.

Ax isn't like a leftover from slave-owners speaking Old English, whose rules and pronunciations had been entirely supplanted by the rules of Middle and then Modern English for well more than half a century by the time their ancestors started English. English is exceptionally fluid, and every American regional accent (included so-called AAVE) has changed greatly over the years.

Reaching back to Old English for a contemporary dialectal pronunciation is facile.

The rest of that paragraph is just you being purposefully obtuse.

Mispronunciation by osmosis is a lot more forgivable than when someone invents a pronunciation for a word you know they only ever read.

I'm sorry, but you are incorrect re: ask/acsian and the OE/ME uses of it in America.

"The Old English verb áscian also appeared as acsian, and both forms continued into Middle English. The two forms co-existed and evolved separately in various regions of England, and later America. The variant ascian gives us the modern standard English ask, but the form "axe", probably derived from Old English acsian, appears in Chaucer: "I axe, why the fyfte man Was nought housband to the Samaritan?" (Wife of Bath's Prologue, 1386.) It was considered acceptable in literary English until about 1600 [14] and can still be found in some dialects of English including African American Vernacular English. It is, however, one of the most stigmatized features of AAVE, often commented on by teachers. It also persists in Ulster Scots as /ˈaks/ and Jamaican English as /ˈaːks/, from where it has entered the London dialect of British English as /ˈɑːks/."

I am not disagreeing with anything else you're saying. Whatever. Have a nice weekend.

I thought the ask -> ax permutation was a relatively recent development. (I could be wrong, of course, but I don't remember hearing it before about 1990)

If I'm right, then the similarity between "ax" and the Old English is just a cool coincidence.

I believe it is also present in Gullah (Geechee), which would make it awesome in it's own non Middle English way.

According to William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics, ax for ask has been around for a long time. In fact, he states that we've always said it.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fi d=2703588&jid=LVC&volumeId=1&issueId=01&aid=2703580

I'm Canadian for christ sake, and black kids were saying 'ax' in the 80's when I was a kid.

I'm just sad we're arguing about a Fox News story that was probably written by a book publisher's PR firm.

No, fuck him for having no understanding of language pedagogy and so being pointless and insulting and also just a cunt.

I agree he's stupid and useless. I'm not sure what you're arguing all over here, though.

That he makes me real mad. I thought that was obvious with calling him a cunt a hundred times.

I wish I had a trillion dollars, I would build a multinational corporation on the concept that no one will ever work there who talks like a white person.

"Ask!? ASK!? I'm sorry, I don't think you understand what we're all about here at Globodom. Do you even speak, Spanish, sir? Let me ax you this... if your kids needed medicine, but you couldn't afford it, would you suck my cock? Do you even know what it means to have money? I'm sorry, this isn't going to work out."

I'm really coming close to blogging about this, and I don't want to do that.

But he's right in terms of prestige. If they go to many job interviews and say "lemme ax you" and "we was" they won't get the job. Plain and simple. And that's not going to change.

So are you this impassioned about every "wrong" dialect and grammatical error, or do you just really hate black people?

His point is that white americans are forgiven for their shitty english in a way that black americans aren't. If you think he's wrong, consider that this newscast consists of 4 minutes of "look at those funny black kids trying to say ask" with a ten second disclaimer about white trash on daytime TV.

I don't think that's Carmonk's point at all. He's talking about adopting different dialects in order to get what you want. Or at the very least, being aware of different dialects.

It has nothing to do with a dialect being "right" or "wrong", and it's only partially about race. Rather, it's about how you present yourself. Making the grammatical & pronunciation "mistakes" in the video marks you as poor & ignorant in this country. It doesn't mean you actually are, but that's what employers will often think.

Teaching people "proper" grammar gives them more tools for economic advancement, which is a genuinely good thing. They shouldn't be ashamed of their natural dialect, but they should be aware of when using it might harm them.

I didn't mean Camonk, I mean't the guy in the video.

I believe I have a partial explanation.

The other day I left a page up in the Hopper. It was the video of the creationist troll and the "flarred" rib cages.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=81484

The next morning I watched it and voted on it, not knowing that it had already got it's seven votes and moved to the front page.

http://www.poetv.com/showvotes.php?vid=81484

If you notice, there is a total of 8 votes, and I believe that was one of the videos that "jumped" back up to the top of the page. Looking at the Hopper voting results for this video gives us:

http://www.poetv.com/showvotes.php?vid=81543

Nine votes for and one vote against, another instance of eight votes.

I do recall there was a fail-safe against this back in the day. Some sort of "This video already made the front page. Click here to view it" return when you tried to vote for it. But this was also when you were able to phantom vote/submit/comment. So, maybe that was taken out when they patched up poeTV and took away the ability to anonymously submit?

I would take this over to In-House Stories and bring it to the Ghost-Mods attention, but I rather not get called a racist, and/or banned. On the other hand, this would make quite a devilish way keep certain videos on the front-page for much longer a time, sort of hacky-sacking between multiple users, if you will.

P.S. Jesus Christ, somebody get Camonk a drink. He's downright scary when he's sober!

P.S.S. The old anonymous submission was not the same as the phantom submission.

There was the way to submit a video as "Anonymous", that was taken away probably because it was abused I wager.

There was an even more devious way to submit(and vote in the hopper, and even comment on videos) anonymously that involved logging out and then hitting the back button a couple of times. It would let you still do things as if you were logged in, but since it couldn't recognize you, it did not display any name.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=61620

Doesn't work anymore.

Oh wow, thanks! I was starting to think the website was keeping track and moving the vids I hadn't watched yet to the top.

You're the cancer that is killing PoeTV. I'm sorry you think that you're so controversial that you just need to scream from the highest mountains whatever idiot thought enters your head and then dismiss anybody who disagrees with you as "offended" because you couldn't POSSIBLY be wrong.

Get murdered.

Stop trying to incite racial tension when there isn't any, Preybymail. Nobody cares about you or your opinion about half the ethnic people you know.

And while you're at it, go drink 63,000 gallons of AIDs.

WWD, do not say that cancer is killing poeTV. Seriously, it was a lot worse when I started lurking here, and I fucking lurked here since POE-Red.

(Seriously, can a mod get this Preybyemaild guy banned? Racist comments like this is why POE-News even pays us attention, and I rather those clowns not bitch and whine about what goes on around here.)

Kill yourself, it's best.

The best you guys can do to counter this guy is "get murdered", "kill yourself" and "drink AIDS"?

Also, haha, black people.