My Love Affair With Standard English!

[Mosiah]

Although I appreciate the English language, I think Jamaicans are too caught up about it sometimes, to the point where we speak better English than the Queen herself! Jamaican radio personalities and news readers sometimes try and pronounce every letter in every word, and that is not good English in my book.

So, when Dahlia Harris of TVJ read sports the other night and almost spit up the entire studio the other night, I pitied her. She said, rather she enunciated, "...the seconD Day of the firsT Test..."

There is no need to separate the "d's" and the "t's". Sounds silly and even a bit uneducated.

[Mosiah]

Oh, good mawnin, Baddaz!

[Historian]

Re: My Objective

i started reading this thread last night... really don't quite understand your objective here...

are you referring to posts in this or other forums... correspondences in your job... common everyday chattings mongst peeple in general... mi jussa try get a line pon yuh awgiment...

as exile seh above, nuff tings depend on de context...

I’m a bit puzzled as to why you chose to question the objective of my post on Standard English, as the subject line (“My Love Affair With Standard Language”) should have suggested to you that there’s no ulterior motive. I find that so many of my people get immediately defensive when the topic of Standard English is touched on, and for the life of me I’ve never understood why this happens!

I can assure you, Baddaz, that I am most certainly not referring to any poster here, as people make posts to communicate, not display their knowledge of the English language! This thread was merely an attempt on my part to start a non-political, non-music thread. Surely there can be nothing wrong with that?! Surely there’s more to a Jamaican forum than political discussion and grassroots issues?!

By the way, on a personal level, holding my job depends, to a very great extent, on me being able to communicate daily in Standard English. This, though, is personal and in no way reflects my view of whether posters choose to communicate in dialect, or whether posts are clean of typos!

By the way, I understand (and fully agree) with what Exile said. Please see my response to Exile above.

I wish you had contributed in the context of the thread instead of attempting to attack it!

[Baddaz]

yuh mek mi coffee guh dung de wrong channel... a poor pun... mi dedding wid laff... mi notice dat every time mi watch de jamaican news broadcasts... the over the top enunciation of ever syllable of every word even when they run onto each other... the pause for the enunciation of a word before proceeding to enuciate the other word, just as you described...

then again mosiah, it could be because of your american experience and influence why you notice that...

[Mosiah]

I thought so, that maybe I had lived in America too long, but I also listen to BBC a lot and not even they do that! They have their own problems with pronunciations, but this over-emphasis that I talk about, it seems to be a strange Jamaican "problem".

[Baddaz]

mi jussa try get a line pon yuh awgiment...

historian... get a hold of yourself... why so defensive... i was in no way attacking your post as you would see in the quote above taken from my initial response to you... i only wanted to see where you wanted to take it without it being hijacked and morphed into something else...

i thought your post was interesting (guess, i should have stated such) and that the sole reason i even bothered to take time to participate in the thread...

if you read my other post to willi, you would see i added another word of the spoken variety (VOIL-ENCE opposed to VI-O-LENCE) that might be of interest...

[Baddaz]

historian... here is a contribution...

evil / evilous... evil is one of those words that is a noun, adjective, adverb... wicked, corrupt, morally bad, malicious, wrong...

i have heard the word evilous used a lot, when no such word exists 'officially' at this time...

[Historian]

No Prob

historian... get a hold of yourself... why so defensive... i was in no way attacking your post as you would see in the quote above taken from my initial response to you... i only wanted to see where you wanted to take it without it being hijacked and morphed into something else...

i thought your post was interesting (guess, i should have stated such) and that the sole reason i even bothered to take time to participate in the thread...

if you read my other post to willi, you would see i added another word of the spoken variety (VIOL-ENCE opposed to VI-O-LENCE) that might be of interest...

Thanks for explaining, boss. And you’re correct in that I should have realized from your contribution of the word “Violence” that your response was largely in the spirit of this thread.

But I’m happy that you gave me an opportunity to make it clear (to any poster who might have wondered about my objective) that this thread was not intended to criticize anyone. In fact, I honestly feel that it would be immensely boring if most posters suddenly started making posts in Standard English!! Not even in England, I’m sure, would the vast majority of forum posters make comments in Standard English. Going even further, I doubt very much if there is any country’s forum where dialect and local expressions do not form the main mode of communication.

Thanks once again for taking the time to clear up my misunderstanding.

[Gamma]

the ones that i find funny is when people believe that the correct pronunciation (and sometimes the word itself) sounds too much like patois and they say it they way they think it should sound (quiche was one such example which was replaces by "qwish"....there is also a similar where the pretty up the patois word...the one example comes to mind is where someone said "mawrger" for "maaga".....

[Baddaz]

there is also a similar where the pretty up the patois word...

yup... it is so common and it is never any less hilarious nuh matter how many times mi experience it... yuh find dat nuff uptown...

[Baddaz]

dat remind mi... one time mi wuz hanging inna brooklyn wid a chick from uptown... wi guh a jamaican restaurant pon flatbush and di chick order 'curried mutton'... yuh waan si how de peeople dem look pon wi... she wuz too hifalutin fi seh curry goat... shortly thereafter, she wuz history as a pal...

[Gamma]

yuh gwa'an wid yuh elitist self!!!

[Historian]

But....

dat remind mi... one time mi wuz hanging inna brooklyn wid a chick from uptown... wi guh a jamaican restaurant pon flatbush and di chick order 'curried mutton'... yuh waan si how de peeople dem look pon wi... she wuz too hifalutin fi seh curry goat... shortly thereafter, she wuz history as a pal...

Nevertheless, Baddaz, while her saying that in a grassroots Jamaican restaurant must certainly have sounded a bit hilarious, would you have felt the same way if your lady friend had gone into a middle-class Caucasian restaurant and loudly ordered, “…curry mutton”? Believe me, an awareness of language usage is important because, like Exile correctly said, “context” matters.

I have always seen written Standard English as been far more important than the spoken form (to me, it does not matter in any way how someone chooses to speak). So, I will ask you this question: How do you feel about restaurant owners who proudly display on their restaurant menus “curry goat” or “stew beef”?

[Gamma]

i have no problem with that...

the ability to convey a though in written form in a succinct and unequivocal manner is often not as easy as it may seem yet when when done effectively it seems so simple.....

BUT in a jamaican restaurant ... it's jamaican so.....by the way is it JERK chicken or JERKED chicken...mi se nuff nuff nuff restauarnt in farin (including munich, boston and i swear seh mi did si a JERK chicken salad in a restaurant in athens....maybe mi shudden swear ...but mi almost certain)

[Historian]

Good Question!

i have no problem with that...

the ability to convey a though in written form in a succinct and unequivocal manner is often not as easy as it may seem yet when when done effectively it seems so simple.....

BUT in a jamaican restaurant ... it's jamaican so.....by the way is it JERK chicken or JERKED chicken...mi se nuff nuff nuff restauarnt in farin (including munich, boston and i swear seh mi did si a JERK chicken salad in a restaurant in athens....maybe mi shudden swear ...but mi almost certain)

Good question! This method of preparing chicken, etc is authentically Jamaican, and so in a sense the name is a Jamaican brand name. I would definitely go with the original name “jerk chicken.”

By the way, we do not say “iced cream,” but rather, “ice cream.” Now, you see just how complex the English language is? Personally speaking, I’ve always pitied the poor foreign student who has to learn English as a second language!! It must be sheer hell for him/her!!

Regarding a menu in a Jamaican restaurant displaying the items “curry goat” and “stew beef,” it would be advisable (in my opinion) to use the correct past-tense form, as it has already being curried and stewed (that is, already prepared). People form opinions based on how one communicates, so unless your clientele is wholly Jamaican, I would definitely go with the Standard English usage.