Re: Grammar

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (ivy_mike) wrote:
>Bob LeChevalier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>> But black kids are NOT much exposed to socially approved English when
>> they are very young, 
>
>Are you not counting TV?  Most low-income black households have one,
>and most of them get a lot of use don't they?  This is one time that
>I think endless hours of TV watching could actually be beneficial for
>a child, as long as they're not watching those hideous Springer type
>shows non-stop.  It serves as a pipeline of sorts from the 
>"outside" world...outside of their own family environment.

Passive exposure to language is relatively worthless, though my
non-native kids learned their first English from Barney.  Its the
other kids with whom they interact, and their family with whom they
interact, that sets the mold.  Unfortunately, low income single parent
families tend to have very little such interaction.

>>and to the extent that they hear it, it is
>> associated with whites, and their families are NOT understood to be
>> "incorrect" or "embarrassing"; indeed the black kid who "talks white"
>> is the one though to be incorrect or embarrassing. 
>
>There is some truth here, but tell me, just what makes the black race
>unique in this respect?

Nothing.  Hispanic kids have the same problems as blacks, and in fact
have a higher flunk and dropout rate (with the peculiar results that
they score higher than blacks on standardized tests, probably because
they are typically older and more mature when they take them, and in
the SAT because the bottom part of the bell curve drops out and never
takes it).

The problem is inherent to living ones childhood in a ghetto/barrio
where all the people share your culture and deprivation, and is
heightened by uneducated parents who do not model the value of
education, and by single working parents who aren't there to model it.

>> It has nothing to do with "intelligence".
>
>So you say anyway.  (BTW, in the U.S., the convention is for your
>right quotation mark above to be *outside* the period.  This is
>sort of a pet peeve of mine, because so many people do it.)

Tough.  I come from a computer programming background, wherein the
computer takes quite literally what is inside the quotes.  Have you
ever seen someone given an email address like "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"; if
computer illiterate, they enter the email address with the question
mark, whereupon of course it bounces?  

Well, I've seen many a programming textbook wherein the authors abided
by (or were corrected by a tech editor) to put punctuation inside the
quote marks where the quote is surrounding an example text.  The
result is that sometimes one does not know whether the punctuation is
punctuation, or whether it is part of what must be typed into the
computer.

In my case, in addition, I've been writing language instruction
material for 16-odd years, and again the inclusion of punctuation
inside the quote marks can sometimes lead to ambiguity.

Thus, this is a rule I have pretty much foresworn to disobey.

lojbab
-- 
lojbab                                             [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bob LeChevalier, Founder, The Logical Language Group
(Opinions are my own; I do not speak for the organization.)
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org