This is very random, and I don't know if this is the place for this, but I need help for a project I am working on for school. I decided to be ambitious despite knowing how much I procrastinate and now it's due tomorrow. What I need help with is what I should have started a while ago.
I wanted to translate a piece of my text into AAVE to showcase a point I was making. However, I don't talk with the accent my extended family uses. I was raised in the Texas suburbs which had black people, but not enough that I'd personally pick up the lingo 🤷🏾♀️
Anyways, the goal is for it to be written the way you would speak it naturally. I also thought it would be cool if some of the words were spelled in the way that you thought they would be. English spelling is definitely not intuitive and I think they way we guessed at spelling made more logical sense.
My professor sent me this essay based on my goals and it has been my inspiration: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B8GekkzIygvaKXzu43XNb8Gkj1dH3pVP/view?usp=sharing
This is the piece of my work that I'm trying to translate. Let me know if it's too long for this to be possible:
Efforts by anthropologists and linguists have been made to move away from ethnocentric behavior and thinking in scholarly contexts. This has led to discoveries about the African-American populace that wouldn’t have been found otherwise. Y’know, because people believed that things associated with African-Americans were primitive and inferior to their own.
Even the language of African-Americans has been attacked. From the very start of our landing in the Americas, we have been beaten out of our native tongues and names. And yet, their influence has pushed it’s way through into modern times. Many say it’s all nonsense, but linguists have found our speech to have a structure of its own.
I want to imagine what it would be like if more people knew that. I think of the story of William Caxton and what he showed us in the prologue of his translated work “Caxton’s Eneydos”. In this text he struggled for which words to use. Here we have the egges vs eyren predicament, a very well known story where he struggled for which words to use in his translation that wouldn’t offend. I think you could guess which one he chose as the “right” one (Hint: It’s the one on our carton labels). Now imagine he chose the other. Sure, people around him could have still chosen to use “eggs”, but what if he was the one to inspire otherwise?
What if our language was met with less aversion? What if African-Americans were able to mass produce books in their own dialect, getting it down in text like Caxton did with the printing press? Would there be a “new English” in North America that broke off along side what we would consider our standard? Instead would the two mix? If the later, I would love to see how our grammar structures change.