To chill or pop a cap in my dome? Whoop, there it is!
HENRY Higgins' nightmare of the decline of the English language is coming true. What's more, this might not be such a bad thing after all.
Earlier this year, a school board in Oakland, California, suggested that English teachers learn to speak the dialect of inner-city black Americans.
This sparked off a storm of protest with white America decrying the "lowering of standards" while many in the African-American lobby self-righteously proclaimed that Ebonics (from "ebony" and "phonics") was a language, not a dialect.
I used to have a somewhat Anglophile view of the English language and looked quite condescendingly upon the Americans with their rolling "r" sound substituted for "dd" or "tt". ("Ladder" becomes "larrer.")
So I was particularly miffed when I had to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language as a prerequisite for admission to university in the US.
A few years later, when I finally got down to studying linguistics, I was mortified to discover that English as spoken by Americans today is closer to the English spoken by the British some 200 years ago than the English spoken by the British today.
Let me say that again, slowly. The Yanks speak English. The Brits do not.
The "Yankee" distinction is important. The pilgrim fathers with their close-knit puritanical societies were more likely to retain a sense of cohesion in their language patterns as a result. California, which until fairly recently was part of Mexico, is a different country. But I digress...
Columnist James Clarke should earn himself a place in history for beginning the dictionary of the South African equivalent of Ebonics. To quote Clarke, as the frustrated Eliza Doolittle might say: "Weds, weds, weds, I'm so sick of weds".
Some words from his Sefrican dictionary: Beds -- flying creatures, Cut -- pulled by a horse, Dock -- not light, Dotter -- female offspring, Feather -- as in "Swiddin is feather north than Spen", Gaddin -- where we grow kebbi-jess. You get the picture...
Jokes aside, American linguist Charles Barron points out that the pattern of English as spoken by black Americans is extremely similar to their ancestral West African languages of Ibo, Yoruba, and Hausa.
There is the construction of sentences without the form of the verb "to be". He sick today.
Repetition of the noun subject with the pronoun. My father, he sick today.
Question patterns without do. What it come to?
No tense indicated in verb. I know it good when he ask me.
Sound patterns follow a similar trend. No consonant pairs jus (for just); men (for mend). Few long vowels or two-part vowels (dipthongs) rat (for right); tahm (for time). No "r" sound mow (for more). No "th" sound substitution of "d" or "f" for "th"; souf (for south) and dis (for this).
I was immediately struck by how similar those patterns of speech and pronunciation are followed by native speakers of Bantu languages. I have found these among our own Nguni as well as those further north in Zimbabwe.
Should we be including Sefrican in our school curricula? It may well be worth investigating. Our teaching patterns generally assume use of English as a first language. English is a second or third language for most of us.
In the case of California, this has led to black American students failing English but achieving distinctions in French. Is this the case with us?
Oh, one more thing. The opening quote is William Shakespeare's Hamlet in Ebonics: "To be or not to be..."