Why can black people pronounce the words “during” and “funeral”?
It’s not anything physical, it’s cultural. And not all blacks do it. There is a culture in part of black America that wants to separate itself by having a slightly different language than the rest of society. It’s nothing new, nor is it relegated to blacks only. Look at the Cockney speakers in England. Some people, if they are raised only around this type of speech, will have a harder time later in life to accommodate new speech patterns. But it is still not anything which cannot be changed because of any structural differences in their speech organs. And lettucer, you may be right to a certain extent, but I’ve heard too many people pronounce the words correctly to apply this to all blacks.
Oh that’s easy. Black people originate in Africa, where the word funeral had negative connotations, unlike in Europe where it is a festive occasion, accompanied by merriment and the well-known week-long celebrations originally instituted by King John III (of Albania). Those negative connotations caused, through a predictable evolutionary development, a physical transformation in the right lower lobe of the tongue, making it impossible to pronounce the word “funeral.” The word “during” presents even greater difficulties, and a much more complicated historical explanation, but it dates to the Egyptian occupation of the Nothern Sahara, “during” which time, if you get my drift, the majority of the black population was subjugated and developed a negative reaction to the word “during,” since it lasted so long (the word “durer,” in fact, means to last in French, I’m sure you know). To make this long story short, the inability of black people to pronounce those words is closely related to the
