Re: Bill Cosby vs Thomas Sowell
Greenman:It's not that I can't appreciate what Cosby is on about, I just thought that one little point in all that rant was worth refuting, at least in a small way. Here's the point where Cosby is incorrect (though for all I know he may have been correct on the date that he said it)."I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go, ra," I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't..." You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language."I gave all of that as context, but really I'm only addressing the last sentence of that quotation.Here is a link to an NPR clip about a translation of the Bible into the Gullah language, considered a dialect of English & spoken by descendents of slaves. The link after that is a very brief intro to some of the features of that language (the best one I could find on YouTube).http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5283230 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuWSJI87r8In fact there was a time, not so very long ago, when it was considered a breach to translate the Bible into English (the English of the day). This of course would have been prior to the time when English came to be the language of commerce and power. One spoke English in the fields (where sheep were sheep and cows were cows) but French in the home (where sheep were mutton & cows were beoef). That is, so long as one had access to the language of commerce & power of the day . . . Interesting, no?
Herring405
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Herring405
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Greenman:It's not that I can't appreciate what Cosby is on about, I just thought that one little point in all that rant was worth refuting, at least in a small way. Here's the point where Cosby is incorrect (though for all I know he may have been correct on the date that he said it)."I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go, ra," I don't know who these people are. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. Then I heard the father talk. This is all in the house. You used to talk a certain way on the corner and you got into the house and switched to English. Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't..." You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language."I gave all of that as context, but really I'm only addressing the last sentence of that quotation.Here is a link to an NPR clip about a translation of the Bible into the Gullah language, considered a dialect of English & spoken by descendents of slaves. The link after that is a very brief intro to some of the features of that language (the best one I could find on YouTube).http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5283230 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvuWSJI87r8In fact there was a time, not so very long ago, when it was considered a breach to translate the Bible into English (the English of the day). This of course would have been prior to the time when English came to be the language of commerce and power. One spoke English in the fields (where sheep were sheep and cows were cows) but French in the home (where sheep were mutton & cows were beoef). That is, so long as one had access to the language of commerce & power of the day . . . Interesting, no?
Herring405
