cherryblossom
10-30-2009, 07:29 AM
The Hiptionary: A Survey of African American Speech Patterns with a Digest of Key Words and Phrases by Mahmoud El-Kati
(Interview with Author):
What moved you to write The Hiptionary?
You got six hours?
No.
It’s an organic experience. Been in my head forever. I’ve always been in love with the way black people speak, their oral tradition. [It has] poetry, great tonality, kind of a built-in mysticism. Nina Simone elevated that with “it be’s that way, sometime.”
Langston Hughes showed great respect for it. Paul Lawrence Dunbar tried to preserve it and we were so middle class oriented, we didn’t understand it. There’s a book, The History of Language. I butcher [the author’s] name all the time. He explained, when I was in college, what language was. He’s a linguist, obviously. One of the things he said was, true language is spoken, and what [writers do] is artificial. What they speak, that’s true. [This] conversation can never be literally captured on a piece of paper.
You don’t get the energetic inflections and such.
An exclamation point won’t do it.
How pleased are you with the end result?
Can’t say. I think I’ll be pleased when [others] make judgment. That’ll tell me something. I did the best I could right now. I can see stuff I needed to do better and so forth. I’ve written almost another book since we finished that.
That’s why this one is called the abridged edition?
Yeah. Generally people abridge something that’s already out there, but I’ve abridged it in advance.
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2009/05/02/books-mahmoud-el-katis-hiptionary-catalogs-african-american-speech-patterns.html
...... a special vocabulary of words, and we owe their existence to the struggles, style, and spirit of the Black Americans and their creative approach to the English language. It flows from an improvisational context of making a way out of no way. From the crucible that was the American legal institution of enslavement and segregation, Black Americans were forced by time and circumstances to create an original and arresting expression of the English language. The first stage of this process began in Colonial America.
From then, and onward, these distinct patterns of speech of the African Americans continued to evolve. So much so that these powers of speech have helped to influence, mold, and shape the way America speaks.
Throughout the cultural evolution of the United States, Black people have consistently contributed a huge stock of colorful words, phrases, sayings, phonics, and other linguistic devices, some of which were brought from Africa.
Hiptionary refers to well-established traditions of African American speech patterns, with changes and adaptations as the years go by. They are, strictly or grammatically speaking, non-dictionary words. The attempt in this volume is to collect representative samples (from every era) of this ongoing and influential part of American English, and give due recognition to it as a major force in shaping the way American English is spoken.
http://www.amazon.com/Hiptionary-African-American-Patterns-Phrases/dp/0967558174
(Interview with Author):
What moved you to write The Hiptionary?
You got six hours?
No.
It’s an organic experience. Been in my head forever. I’ve always been in love with the way black people speak, their oral tradition. [It has] poetry, great tonality, kind of a built-in mysticism. Nina Simone elevated that with “it be’s that way, sometime.”
Langston Hughes showed great respect for it. Paul Lawrence Dunbar tried to preserve it and we were so middle class oriented, we didn’t understand it. There’s a book, The History of Language. I butcher [the author’s] name all the time. He explained, when I was in college, what language was. He’s a linguist, obviously. One of the things he said was, true language is spoken, and what [writers do] is artificial. What they speak, that’s true. [This] conversation can never be literally captured on a piece of paper.
You don’t get the energetic inflections and such.
An exclamation point won’t do it.
How pleased are you with the end result?
Can’t say. I think I’ll be pleased when [others] make judgment. That’ll tell me something. I did the best I could right now. I can see stuff I needed to do better and so forth. I’ve written almost another book since we finished that.
That’s why this one is called the abridged edition?
Yeah. Generally people abridge something that’s already out there, but I’ve abridged it in advance.
http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/article/2009/05/02/books-mahmoud-el-katis-hiptionary-catalogs-african-american-speech-patterns.html
...... a special vocabulary of words, and we owe their existence to the struggles, style, and spirit of the Black Americans and their creative approach to the English language. It flows from an improvisational context of making a way out of no way. From the crucible that was the American legal institution of enslavement and segregation, Black Americans were forced by time and circumstances to create an original and arresting expression of the English language. The first stage of this process began in Colonial America.
From then, and onward, these distinct patterns of speech of the African Americans continued to evolve. So much so that these powers of speech have helped to influence, mold, and shape the way America speaks.
Throughout the cultural evolution of the United States, Black people have consistently contributed a huge stock of colorful words, phrases, sayings, phonics, and other linguistic devices, some of which were brought from Africa.
Hiptionary refers to well-established traditions of African American speech patterns, with changes and adaptations as the years go by. They are, strictly or grammatically speaking, non-dictionary words. The attempt in this volume is to collect representative samples (from every era) of this ongoing and influential part of American English, and give due recognition to it as a major force in shaping the way American English is spoken.
http://www.amazon.com/Hiptionary-African-American-Patterns-Phrases/dp/0967558174