this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
53 points (70.5% liked)

Technology

59534 readers
3209 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Warning: I've edited the comment that you're replying to. I'm saying this for the sake of transparency, as you're clearly quoting the earlier version.

The key here is that AAVE is not written, but AAE is. That "V" is for vernacular, it excludes written English by definition.

Now, I'm not sure if those white kids are using AAE or simply borrowing things from AAE into their written English. I simply don't have data on that.

There’s been bleed over for centuries, but with the Internet and social media it’s merging faster, which is common for dialects of people that interact frequently

Varieties merging or splitting is rarely the result of just more contact between people; it's all about identity. If things are happening as you described them, it's simply that those white kids stopped seeing black people as "the others", to see them as "part of the same group as us".

[–] givesomefucks@lemmy.world -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That “V” is for vernacular, it excludes written English by definition.

Yeah. But most people "write" online like they speak...

https://commonwealthtimes.org/2021/02/18/aave-is-not-your-internet-slang-it-is-black-culture/

If people followed rules about language, yeah, vernacular would just be spoken speech. But that's not how it works. The rules are made to reflect what people are doing. The rules don't control what people do.

So yes, while the word vernacular commonly meant only spoken words, there ain't nothing stopping nobody from typing like they speak.

And people been doing it for a long time

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah. But most people “write” online like they speak…

That's a common misconception.

While your written and spoken varieties do interact a fair bit, no, people don't "write like they speak". Not even online.

And that is not simply an "ackshyually". A lot of AAVE features simply don't transpose into writing - like prosody, non-rhoticity, /ɪ/-breaking, /äɪ/-monophtongisation... at most you can consciously approximate them into writing, but they won't be there.

If people followed rules about language, yeah, vernacular would just be spoken speech. But that’s not how it works. The rules are made to reflect what people are doing.

That is not about people following/not following "rules", it's about nomenclature - it's exactly the reason why "AAE" and "AAVE" are necessary as separated terms.

[–] treefrog@lemm.ee -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

More and more people are using speech to text. And it does show how differently people speak than write (apparently I never say my be in because, for example).

But it also means that llms aren't only being fed text, but also speech converted into text.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 4 points 2 months ago

For me it's like "holy fuck... do I eat so fucking many vowels???" It reaches a point that I eventually gave up using text-to-speech with Portuguese in my cell phone, I go straight for Italian because at least then it gets me right.

But it also means that llms aren’t only being fed text, but also speech converted into text.

That might be part of the issue causing the bias shown in the article.