[Ads-l] Non-standard (was Heard: “Everybody knew…”

[Wilson Gray]

Thanks, Jim. I needed that. Sometimes, without realizing it, I get beside
myself and need to get next to myself.

On Sun, Sep 17, 2017 at 7:36 AM, James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at netscape.com>
wrote:

> On Sat, 16 Sep 2017 05:13:09 Zone - 0400  Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
>
> >“Everybody knew what was an ad”
> >
> >is a structure cited by Labov, back in the day, as a peculiarity of the
> >non-standard Negro vernacular, as opposed to the formerly-standard
> >
> >“Everybody knew what an ad was.”
>
> I object to your use of "non-standard".
>
> I hold that, grammatically, English consists of three dialects:
>   1) Patrician or Literary.  This is the one list-members here use.  It is
> similar to but differs in some details from the "prescriptive" English that
> list-members like to talk about.
>   3) Plebeian (thank you to list-members who pointed out that I did not
> know how to spell this name---this time I checked a dictionary).  Nobody
> don't know what this dialect is.
>   3) King James
>
>
> "Negro vernacular" or "AAVE" or whatever you want to call it is simply a
> subset of Plebeian.  It is hardly "non-standard".   I am far from an expert
> on AAVE but to my ears AAVE has a standard about as well established as the
> standard for Patrician.
>
>    - Jim Landau
>
> PS: A possible candidate for Fred Shapiro's comic-strip database, from
> Pogo (it appears in the collection _Instant Pogo_ which unfortunately I
> cannot locate my copy of at the moment:
>    Magician 1:  Who was that lady I sawed with you last night?
>    Magician 2:  That was no lady.  That was my half-sister!
>
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>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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