African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard English with Mistakes (1999) [pdf]

Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by Pharylon on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:22PM (#15460034)

Sure, and many rules of AAVE are more consistent.

For instance take the following words in standard English:

    * yourself
    * myself
    * ourselves
    * himself
    * itself

One of these things is not like the other! All of these take the form of possive + "self," except "himself." And sure enough, in AAVE we have "hisself" instead. A more logical, consistent replacement.

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by csours on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:25PM (#15460064)

So when some people think of AAVE speakers as incorrect, it is because they don't use the right wrong way to talk. Linguistics is a weird field.

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by vorg on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:52PM (#15460319)

You omitted 2 of the reflexive pronouns. Only the 1st and 2nd person forms use the possessive:

  * myself, ourselves, yourself.

All of the 3rd person forms use the personal pronoun:

  * themselves, himself, herself, itself

Does AAVE also use "theirselves" ?

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by somecontext on Thursday October 12, 2017 @06:11PM (#15461713)

This article http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/7610/volumes/v21/NA-21 claims that AAVE uses "theirselves".

A quick search on Twitter suggests that "theirselves" is indeed used by people who use "hisself", but perhaps half an order of magnitude less than "themselves".

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by jtuente on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:32PM (#15460139)

To more heavily emphasize the point here consider the feminine possive as well, her/hers:

    * herself

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by bonzini on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:42PM (#15460214)

"her" is both the possessive and the accusative, so it's consistent with either myself or himself. Itself too, since you can consider it a contraction of either "it-self" or "its-self".

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by weberc2 on Thursday October 12, 2017 @02:47PM (#15460270)

I recall that immigrant populations that don't integrate into the main population for long periods of time have a tendency to learn simplified versions of the original language. If I recall correctly, Old English lost a lot of its ornament when the Norse settled in Britain.

EDIT: I'm puzzled by the downvotes. Am I mistaken? If so, I'm happy to be corrected.

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Re:African American Vernacular English Is Not Standard Engli... by yodon on Thursday October 12, 2017 @03:36PM (#15460660)

You are probably thinking of Pidgins and Creoles[0], two very well studied linguistic categories that come about when two or more groups with no shared language come together (Pidgin) and then their children learn the Pidgin as a first language (morphing it into a Creole). AAVE is grammatically and functionally distinct from either a Pidgin or a Creole.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

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