Peter Constable scripsit:
(Taking ltru off the cc list)
> But when a "Yinglish" speaker uses a word like
> "pshat", nobody would suggest that that's an English term -- I reject
> your suggestion that this is just plain English with specialized English
> vocabulary as these are clearly not English and not even borrowings into
> English (they are not spoken with English phonology).
Don't be deceived by the conventional spelling: the usual pronunciation
is [p@'SAt], and googling shows "peshat" as slightly more common than
"pshat". Indeed, most of the Slavic and Hebrew Yiddish words with
really un-English phonology have *not* been borrowed into English.
The exception, of course, is the sh+consonant words that are now part,
if a marginal part, of English phonology. And if I myself say "challah"
(the bread) as ['XAl at ], there are plenty of Jews who make it ['hAli],
homonymous with "holly"; similarly ['sUrIs] for "tsuris".
> At that point, I believe your options (in terms of the categories that
> sociolinguists use) are limited to:
>
> - you deem this to be an instance of code switching: moving back and
> forth between two languages (I often hear devs that are mother-tongue
> speakers of some other language do this, switch to English for certain
> technical terms).
I think this is an excessively broad definition of code-switching. See
http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/06/french-in-all-its-purity.html
for how pervasive borrowing (of English into French) can get without in
any way being confused with code-switching.
> - ye deem this to be a distinct language
If so, it's one that smoothly integrates into the English dialect
continuum, and exists in isolated clumps in the U.S., Australia,
the U.K., etc., sharing most of the phonological features of
the non-Jewish dialects surrounding each clump.
>From the Wikipedia article on Spanglish:
More importantly, the many varieties of "Spanglish" developed
largely independently. In the case of a language like Spanish or
English, there was a time and place where it originated, spread
out to many countries and regions, and then diverged from the
original form. In the case of "Spanglish," there isn't any such
"original" version of it, from which its "dialects" sprang;
each form represents a unique instance of English influencing
the speech of Spanish speakers.
--
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
--Nicholas van Rijn
John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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