Yous see, wire telegraph is a kind o' a dead, dead long moggy. yous pull 'is tail in nicked york and 'is barnet is meow'n in los angeles. do yous cotton ed this? and didgie operates exactly de same way: yous send signals e'yer, dee receive dem thuz. de only difference is dat thuz is nah moggy.The quote above here, try to read it out loud. Sounds stupid, eh?
Did you understand what you were saying? Is it perhaps written by a little kid who doesn't know the language very well? A person who didn't speak English tried to write this?
What you were reading is a quote by Albert Einstein, arguably on of the most intelligent persons ever, but it's translated to Scouse, one of the strongest British dialects from the Merseyside area. While it may sound stupid at first, the content isn't altered in any way.
We tend to think people who speak with a strong accent are often dumb and stupid, but I don't agree at all with this and I thought the discussion we had about this in classroom last week was very interesting.
During my last internship, I was in a class and one of the students was a foreigner, who moved to Belgium a couple of years ago. Already on the first time when I came to observe the class, their teacher came to me and said this guy, I'm gonna call him Marc in this post, was really dumb, and required a lot of attention. But during the lessons, I noticed the teacher was very punctual on language, and often refused to listen to answers by students if they didn't express themselves in proper Dutch.
Marc never asked to give any answers, and was very quiet in the classroom. It looked like he didn't know what he was doing. Also, his written answers on a test were often very short and lacked any details.
During the lessons I had to give in that group myself, I planned some tasks which they had to do in small groups, and guess what!!? Marc was very active and he contributed a lot to the group he was working with. I observed him and his group a lot and, although lots of the things he said contained grammatical errors, the contents of the things he said were very useful for his group. At the same time, some other members of his group helped him out expressing what he said in proper Dutch.
After this lesson, I had a little chat with the teacher and said I thought Marc did really well and was a good student. She didn't knew what to answer...
This example leans closely to the contents of the text about Lee we saw last week, and I think it also shows that we shouldn't judge someone purely based on his ability to express himself in a specific language. The contents are the main part, the rest will follow.
Oh yeah, by the way. The translation of the quote at the beginning of this post is the following:
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
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