Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

However, systematic flouting sounds like something one could alternately call “linguistic delinquency,” which puts into a sad perspective a defense of Black English founded on lists of rules it breaks. As I write this, the Wikipedia entry for Black English lists twenty-three grammatical traits, of which twelve are reductions and droppings. That’s over half, and among the other traits are such things as multiple negatives (“Ain’t nothin’ nobody can do for no man no how”) and good old aks and graps for grasp. Now, when consonants are reversed in cases like that, linguists call it “metathesis” and just think of it as something that happens to sounds sometimes. For example, the word for miracle in Latin was miraculum, but in Spanish the r and the l traded places and the result was milagro. But in the here and now, walking around listening to people speak English far, far away from Old Castile in both time and space, let’s face it, aks just sounds like the wrong way to say ask.

Hebrew sort of has that place trading too!