RE: Yiddish - medieval Ebonics?

[Mike Dullaghan <michael.f.dullaghan@adn.alcatel.com>]

Poster: Mike Dullaghan <michael.f.dullaghan@adn.alcatel.com>


On 11-Jun-98 jsrechts@imap.unc.edu wrote:
>
>Poster: jsrechts@imap.unc.edu
>

[snip]

>Ebonics is essentially a ghetto language.  The question is "Is Ebonics a
>full
>fledged language?"   Some school boards in California think so.

[snip]

Actually, the story as I understand it is that Ebonics started out as
a scam ("re-classification for budgetary management purposes" if you
prefer).

Some educators in California who could not get sufficient funding for
remedial English classes noticed that they could apply for federal
funds to teach English as a second language. Naturally in order to
apply you had to be planning to teach people whose first language was
not English -- so the question of whether a dialect was now a full
fledged language or not was settled by budgetary constraints.

Michael the Eclectic
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