Can i axe you something

Have a nice sunday. Artrella Banned BA. Edwin said:. It's a dialect of English called Ebonics. Your native language is English and you live in Philadelphia and you don't know what Ebonics is?

How can that be? Axe is definitely non-standard, but typical of ordinary African American working class pronunciation. The term Ebonics was coined by people who believed that African American children would do better in American schools if their dialect were recognized as a perfectly legitimate dialect of American English, with its own vocabulary and grammar, and that it should be given a name and be taught as such.

Others believe that all schools in this country should teach only standard American English and that it should be obligatory for every public official except the ignoramus in the White House, of course to speak only standard English. I believe, incidentally, that its fine to speak dialect in some contexts, but that schools should also prepare kids to speak and write the standard versions of the languages of their countries. I think most people would agree.

US English, Palestinian Arabic bilingual. David said:. In fact in day to day talk I use some Ebonics, but that one phrase I found quite unusuall and I did not know what it meant. I wasn't sure if it was Ebonics or perhaps it was a slang term used to say ASKed you question with a hidden meaning Artrella said:.

Hi Edwin! That link is great! I didn't know this existed, I thought it was just mispelling or mispronunciation!! Hello, Furthermore, it is quite redondant to say "ask a question. By saying "ask" you're already implying that it is going to be a question. I think it's better to say "Can I ask you something? Edher said:. Furthermore, it is quite redondant to say "ask a question.

Tobycek Senior Member England, English. This use of "axe" is not confined to America. It's common among many West Indian patois, and can be found in any British city which has or has had a large West Indian population.

Nick said:. Well, no. They could be asking for a favor or something else. So, [aks] was the regular literary form i. This is probably at least in America tangled in with the fact that [aks] is a marker of African American English.

Even within the African American community, the form is stigmatized. Oprah, for example, who often uses markers of African American English especially when speaking with other African Americans almost never uses [aks] for [ask]. So the idea that [aks] is the wrong form and that [ask] is correct is based on a social construction of how an intelligent, educated individual should speak.

It has nothing to do with the linguistic qualities of the word itself. Now, the interesting thing about these forms is that they both have phonological pressures pushing English speakers towards using them.

In general, you want the sounds that are the most sonorant nearer the center of a syllable. And [s] is more sonorant than [k], so it seems like [ask] should be the favored form. But , like I said, [s] is special. So the special status of [s] seems to favor [aks]. The fact that each form can be modeled perfectly well based on our knowledge of the way English words are formed helps to explain why both forms continue to be actively used, even centuries after they emerged. And, who knows?

Try and keep that in mind the next time you talk about the right and wrong ways to say something. OED Online. December Oxford University Press. View all posts by Rachael Tatman. I rather doubt it. Which brings me to my point. Why should we view the typically purely descriptive approach of linguists as the most reasonable and sufficient one? Would it not be more helpful to millions of people trying to learn English if there were more consonance between the written and spoken languages?

But I do believe that several forms of social utility might accrue from trying to reduce the chaos a bit—not the least of which could be a modest reduction in the available shibboleths many of us reflexively use to judge and discriminate against each other. I think you make several really interesting points here. But I also think that there are a couple flaws with trying to enforce spelling pronunciations, even if the goals easier access to literacy, helping people learning English as a second language are good ones.

The first major problem is that the English spelling system is not phonetic. Not by a long shot. Of course, we could move towards making the spellings more in line with pronunciations, but historically spelling reform has failed terribly, just ask Shaw.

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