{"id":15098,"date":"2014-05-26T17:57:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-26T17:57:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/?p=15098"},"modified":"2014-05-26T18:15:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T18:15:08","slug":"oakland-board-of-trade-ad-pseudo-african-american-vernacular-sunset-magazine-vol-xii-1904","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/2014\/05\/26\/oakland-board-of-trade-ad-pseudo-african-american-vernacular-sunset-magazine-vol-xii-1904\/","title":{"rendered":"Oakland Board of Trade Ad – Pseudo African-American Vernacular – Sunset Magazine – Vol. XII, 1904 – African-American English, Ronald A. Perry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE – Sunset Magazine<\/p><\/div>\n

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Google Books<\/p><\/div>\n

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Sunset Magazine – Volume XII – 1904 – CLICK FOR LINK – Google Books (PDF)<\/p><\/div>\n

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The arrival of the first slaves in North America marked the beginning of an American fascination with the culture and speech of these black men who had exchanged a barbarous existence in Africa for a life of servitude among civilized, English-speaking Christians. But however much novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, or songwriters like Stephen Foster attempted to represent black speech, one finds in their work little indication of their having carefully studied it. Touches of \u201cnigger\u201d dialect lend pathos to the speeches of Stowe\u2019s Uncle Tom, humor to the philosophizing of Twain\u2019s runaway slave Jim, and sentimentality to Stephen Foster\u2019s Uncle Ned (\u201cHe\u2019s gone war de good niggers\u00b9\u00a0go\u2026\u201d) precisely due to its being \u201cbad\u201d English. An example of such pseudo African-American dialect is \u201cOh! Susanna\u201d. This Stephen Foster composition, sung by generations of American schoolchildren in Standard English, is given here in the original version:<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I come from Alabama<\/em>
\nwith my Banjo on my knee\u2014<\/em>
\nI\u2019s g\u2019wine to Lou\u2019siana,<\/em>
\nMy true lub\u00b2 for to see,<\/em>
\nIt rain\u2019d all night de day I left,<\/em>
\nDe wedder it was dry;<\/em>
\nThe sun so hot I froze to def\u2014<\/em>
\nSusanna, don\u2019t you cry.<\/em><\/p>\n

FOOTNOTES:<\/p>\n

\u00b9During the nineteenth century the word \u201cnigger\u201d, had not yet acquired its meaning as a racial slur. As a colloquial term for \u201cNegro\u201d it occurs in the songs of Stephen Foster, the writings of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, and even in reported conversations of Abraham Lincoln. Some have insisted that such traditional literature be censored.<\/em><\/p>\n


\n\u00b2\u00a0Nineteenth century caricatures of African-Americans inexplicably represent them as being unable to pronounce the phoneme \u201cv\u201d, so that we frequently have black preachers talking about \u201cebil\u201d (evil) and \u201cde debil\u201d (the devil).<\/em><\/p>\n

–\u00a0African Americans as Perceived by White Society,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>African-American English – \u00a0Ronald Alan Perry\u00a0– Revista No. 31<\/a><\/p>\n

ABSTRACT:<\/p>\n

The Africans who were brought forcibly to America over a period of three centuries developed a characteristic speech that combined the English of their white masters with grammatical and phonetic features common to West African languages. This speech, known as \u201cEbonics\u201d or African American Vernacular English, is characterized by the simplification or transformation of certain phonemes and by copula omission (un-conjugated \u201cto be\u201d). A decision by the Oakland, California school district to recognize \u201cEbonics\u201d as a distinct African-American language has fueled debate as to whether it is a dialect of English, a language distinct from English, or simply bad English. In any event, this \u201cblack\u201d English has fascinated white society and occupies an important place in Anglophonic literature, folklore and music. As manifested in the musical genre known as blues, it has influenced all of today\u2019s popular music, prompting even Britons to imitate certain aspects of African-American speech. – Professor Ronald A. Perry – Universidad de Techn\u00f3lica \u00a0de Pereira<\/a><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The arrival of the first slaves in North America marked the beginning of an American fascination with the culture and speech of these black men who had exchanged a barbarous existence in Africa for a life of servitude among civilized, English-speaking Christians. But however much novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, or songwriters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[18,1268,1272],"tags":[2388,2389],"class_list":["post-15098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-african-american-history","category-racism","category-railroad","tag-california","tag-oakland-ca"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pXBbJ-3Vw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15098"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15103,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15098\/revisions\/15103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fadingad.com\/fadingadblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}