22524: Docteed: Re: 22496: Antoine: The Kathy Grey's stand on Haitian Creole

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Docteed@aol.com
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RE: Guy Antoine's comments

Actually, the  reference to Mambo makes me think of Cuban music and
dance--remember the movie The Mambo Kings?--whereas manbo is a strictly
Haitian
Vodou/Voodoo reference. The larger issue is whether it is important to
standardize a writing system in the interest of furthering the legitimacy
of a
language--in this case Haitian Creole--in order for everyone to recognize
it as
a  language in its own right. (I personally have no doubt that it is, but
some
people, including some Haitians, think it is not.) If people in Haiti and
around the world don't have a sense that the language has a correct or
true
writing system--and that is what the word "orthography" means--then when
it is
spelled this way or that way arbitrarily, people may think it is not a
valid
means of communication. That is why idiosyncratic spelling can no longer
be
acceptable, as Guy Antoine is trying so hard to point out.  It has nothing
to
do with whether a person is a legitimate priestess, but whether, in the
interest of shared understanding and a positive repesentation of Haitian
language and culture, we are spelling any word  according to a recognized
system. And this is the system the schools in Haiti are using (with some
variation that we can attribute to a continuing reliance on the alleged
superiority of French).  Sure, it may seem like an unimportant little
thing to
argue about, but in the evolution of language part of its being considered
a
language v. a dialect is the presence of an orthographic system, a
literature,
a separate cultural history, and so on. That is really what is at stake
here--the legitimacy of Haitian language. And that is important to me
personally.
DTeed