Taking the "broken" out of "broken English," part 2

Before I move on to what a language needs in order to be a human language, let me take care of one other thing that people sometimes see as "missing" from African American English, the English-lexicon creoles, etc. I am speaking of the copula.

The copula is a "linking verb" (Crystal 1991: 84). The most frequently used one in English is probably be and its conjugated forms: am, is, are; was, were; being; been.  The function of the copula is to link phrasal constituents of sentences, especially a subject and its predicate. Predicates in English that can be linked to a subject by the copula include:

(1) Noun Phrase:   This is a book.
      Prepositional Phrase:   They are at school.
      Verb Phrase:   I am walking home.
      Adjective Phrase:   She is tall.

In the English Creole that I am using for this exercise, only the first two would have a copula, and only one of those uses something that sounds like English is- but more about that in a later installment.  The other two would look like this:

(2)  Verb Phrase:  A wakin hom.
       Adjective phrase:  Shi tal.

In some varieties of African-American, the first two would also usually not have a linking verb. Note the following from AAVE:

(3)  Noun Phrase:     This a book.
       Prepositional Phrase:     They at school.

At some times and places in the past (and sometimes even now) children, especially African American children, who produced sentences like those in (2) and (3) were labeled as cognitively deficient or language-impaired, because the sentences don't contain an identifiable "verb," a thing we deem necessary for complete sentences in English, as in (1) above. Such children have even been placed in Special Education classes, and in fact the Head Start Program was in its earliest years designed to get African American children out of their supposedly language-deficient homes.

But there's a problem, and it's not a minor one. The languages of the world are not all in agreement about what needs or doesn't need to appear in the predicate of a sentence. All languages have predicates, but they can be interestingly and even surprisingly different in terms of what they demand. To give an extreme example, Aymara, a language found mainly in the Andes in the region where Perú, Bolivia, and Chile intersect, demands an accounting of the source of the information presented in the predicate. The source might be personal knowledge (I was a witness), knowledge through language (a witness told me), evidence of some kind that I or someone else saw, a legend or myth about which nobody alive has personal knowledge, or even an admission that no source is forthcoming (I'm just talking for the sake of talking). In English we can say, with impunity, she ate the cheese, without any source of evidence or validity whatsoever. Aymara requires more:

(4)  Jupax kis manq'iwa  (she ate the cheese, and I saw her do it).
       Jupax kis manq'iwa siwa  (someone who saw her says that she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'pachawa  (I saw evidence-maybe cheese crumbs- that she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'itayna   (the old stories say she ate the cheese).
       Jupax kis manq'chïxa   (maybe she ate the cheese, maybe she didn't, whatever...)

The point is that you have to do something, otherwise the sentence is not grammatical, but this is not required for English except in very special contexts (scientific papers, for example, but certainly not in political discourse!). The further point is that there are plenty of languages around that don't require "verbs" in places where Accepted English requires them. Take the Russian translations of the sentences in (2) and (3):

(5)  Eto knyiga   (this is a book).
       Oni v shkole  (they are at school).
       Ona vysokaya  (she is tall).

There are other, unrelated languages I could ppoint to. For example, here are a couple in Malay-Indonesian:

(6)  Ini kuda   (this is a horse).
       Kuda ini bagus   (this horse is good).

And so on. The point, which I may or may not have taken too long to make, is that languages, including African American ones, differ in what they demand of the predicates of their sentences, and yet they all work as human languages.

No child is "cognitively deficient" just because they might say something like she my teacher. To insist otherwise is simply to be racist.

The illusion of difference

Racialist "scientists" sometimes defend their ideas about the reality of human races by invoking the "it's so obvious" argument. Look at the photo below, they might say, and you can tell immediately which person has African ancestry and which has European ancestry:

And of course it is pretty obvious that, statistically speaking, the Reverend Gary Davis, on the left, is more likely to have recent African ancestors, while the little girl on the right is more likely to have recent European ancestry.  It was sudden confrontations with people who looked and behaved very different from themselves that led Europeans to develop their ideas about "racial" differences. In the age of European exploration and conquest, Europeans for the first time boarded sailing vessels, sailed away from people who were familiar, and after long sea voyages were suddenly faced with people who were maximally unfamiliar. This experience of human diversity led to Linnaeus's taxonomic classification of humans into four distinct groups and, a few years later, Blumenbach's elaboration of five categories.

The problem, as we now know, is that the nature of biological variation does not favor the division of species into discrete subcategories (subspecies, or races). Biological traits display clinal distribution, as shown by the gradual increase in frequency of the B blood type allele as we move east across Eurasia.

The same is true for traits that we think of as diagnostic of human "races," such as skin color. There is no clear division between "black" and "white" skin colors; instead, skin color varies clinally with skin tending to be darker near the Equator and gradually becoming lighter in populations that are located farther and farther from the Equator.

We can get an idea of how this looks on actual people by examining portraits from (left to right) Scandinavia, Spain, Morocco, and Nigeria.

The concept of "races" as discrete categories is as bogus for humans as it is for any other wide-spread species, such as Puma concolor (a.k.a. cougar, mountain lion, panther, etc.). This is a fact that is increasingly accepted by biologists, but still denied by race-affirmers like J. Philippe Rushton, who divides humans into three categories: mongoloid, negroid, and caucasoid and then attributes different behavioral traits to these groups. But more about this in a future post.

Catching up, again

As previously reported, I had rotator cuff surgery on July 7 and have been wallowing in pain medication and general aimlessness since then. But now it's time to pull myself out of my funk, since my Trophy Wife (apologies to PZ Myers) is off to visit relatives on Monday, leaving me to fend for myself for the following three weeks. Just in time, it seems, I can now bathe and dress myself, do some simple things in the kitchen, and even drive.

Meanwhile, lots of interesting things have been happening out in the world, responses to which have been swimming in my head. And now that I can type two-handed on my laptop, I get to catch up a little. The goal is to call attention, and maybe save depth for a little later.

Honduras. The evidence seems to be accumulating that the US prefers the leaders of the coup against President Zelaya over Zelaya himself. Too bad, but not that surprising, given that it also appears that the golpistas (coupsters) have strong ties to well-placed crypto-fascists here in the US, and of course the Honduran military is virtually a branch of the US military. There's a brief article here, and a more detailed one here.

Judge Sotomayor and the Rethuglicans. I watched some of her confirmation hearings, mostly snippets on the news. I must say I was astounded by the blatant, over-the-top sexism and racism displayed by the Rethuglican neo-confederates Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). The ongoing and apparently indestructible meme that White Males can't possibly be biased, since they have no ethnic identity that might provide a basis for such bias, is understandable, of course. From a linguistic/anthropological perspective, we say that White Male is the unmarked category; its very real biases are thus rendered invisible. But still, can't we climb out of the of 19th century sometime, please?

"Race" and ethnicity. Pundick Pat "why on Earth does this troll still have a job?" Buchanan keeps calling Judge Sotomayor a "racist" for siding with the Hispanics in a recent discrimination case. When will he (and most of the rest of the US) learn that "Hispanic" is no more a "race" than "English-speaking" is? See my photo of Spanish-speaking Cuban schoolchildren in an earlier post.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t. Speaking of the aforementioned pundick, on July 14 HumanEvents.com published an article by Buchanan titled "How to Handle Sonia." "Sonia?" Is this really the proper way to refer to someone with a 17-year record on the bench? Of course, for him it is, because she's a Hispanic Female.

Affirmative action. Buchanan, again, this time claiming, in the same HumanEvents article, that Sotomayor's (or should I say "Sonia's?") entire career is the result of her taking advantage of affirmative action to gain benefits that she was never really qualified for. Oh, the irony: PB is naturally unaware (because he belongs to the unmarked category) that White Males like himself have been the exclusive beneficiaries of affirmative action since the founding of the Republic. He may even be unaware that, without this White Male targeted affirmative action, nobody would be paying him to pundickificate...

There must be more but my right arm is getting tired and I need to put it back in its sling. Perhaps more on some of these topics later.

More evidence that Nixon was a sociopath

In the newly-released tapes of conservations Richard Nixon had with various aides, celebrities, etc. in 1973, there's this bit taken from right after the Roe v. Wade decision:

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding, “Or a rape.”

So, a "black" and "white" couple having a child was, in Nixon's twisted mind, equivalent to being raped and having a child. Or rather, the children so conceived were equally ill-begotten.

There must be more to say here, but I can't do it.

Paging Dr. Gupta: "ethnic skin?!?"

If I knew a lawyer, I'd sue Dr. Sanjay Gupta for anthropological malpractice. On his CNN program "House Call" this morning, Dr. Gupta had a segment on skin cancer. To discuss the particular problems this poses for people with dark skin color, Dr. Gupta brought on a "specialist in ethnic skin."

"Ethnic skin?"

We might expect first-year college students to have such a muddled notion of "ethnicity," but a presumably well-educated person like Dr. Gupta? Uncritically applying the prevailing folk model concept of "ethnicity," Dr. Gupta has conflated ethnicity with biological differences, such as skin color. Anthropologists, in constructing scientific descriptions and explanations, take care to separate ethnicity from biology. Ethnicity, for anthropologists, refers to shared cultural features such as language, religion, food preferences, and so on: features that are not specified in the genome, but rather handed down in the process of enculturation. To conflate ethnicity, i.e. culture, with biology is to risk repeating the essentialism that supported Social Darwinism, the genocide of Native Americans, the eugenics movement, the Nazi Holocaust...

Franz Boas demonstrated that culture, "race" (by which he meant strictly biological difference), and language are independent variables in his book Race, Language, and Culture, published in... 1940! Boas used ethnographic case studies to show that biologically similar groups of people can have very different languages or cultures, biologically different groups can have similar languages and cultures, and so on, in any combination. A classic modern example of this involves the Warlpiri people of central Australia, who speak a language with noun declensions using suffixes, like Latin, despite being about as biologically distant from the Romans as possible.

Here's another example: a group of schoolchildren I photographed in Pinar Del Río, Cuba, back in 2002. What ethnic group do they all belong to? My guess: Cuban. Which ones have "ethnic skin?" My guess: none, since there is no such thing.

This is why an introduction to general anthropology should be required for every person on the planet.