Re: A China-Sumer connection

phippsmartin_at_hotmail.com
Date: 03/06/05 

Date: 6 Mar 2005 08:51:36 -0800

I had forgotten of course the influence on Filipino languages due to
the 400 year Spanish occupation. The way Filipinos call themselves
Filipinos (male) and Filipinas (female), just about all of the
vocabulary they use to describe Western things, even the formal names
they give themselves, are all examples of this influence. It was
inevitable, given that Spanish would have been the language of
instruction in colonial schools. Now the language of instruction is
English and people routinely switch back and forth between their
regional dialect and English when talking amongst themselves, or at
least college educated people do this, with Filipino farmers and
fishermen being much less likely to do this.

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> I wrote:
> > I do that with my wife: I speak a mix
>
> Languages do not "become related." They get words and even syntactic
> structures from each other.
>
> > of Filipino and English with her and with Chinese people who can
speak
> > English (outside class) I and they speak a mixture of Mandarin
Chinese
> > and English, because neither of us is fluent. Again, Turks and
>
> I hope each of you spoke to your children in your own language and
not
> in your non-fluent attempts at each other's language; that way, they
had
> a good chance of growing up perfectly bilingual.

Thank you so much for your child rearing advice. Of course, this is an
example of how "unrelated languages" can become related: when two
groups of people live in the same area (Spanish speaking and Filipino
speaking for example), people are going to intermarry. The kids are
going to be bilingual, but when they talk amongst themselves (forgive
the caps but this is important) THEY DO SPEAK A MIXTURE OF THE TWO
LANGUAGES THEY WERE EXPOSED TO. They will start a sentence in one
language and finish it in another. They will make a perfectly correct
grammatical sentence in one language but borrow vocabulary from the
other language. Of course when they are speaking to people who speak
only one of the languages they were exposed to growing up, they will be
careful to try to use only the language that the person they are
speaking to understands, but the language they speak to other people
like them, people who are also fluent in both languages they grew up
with, is going to be a mixture of these two languages. It happens all
the time. Languages don't just simply change over time: they absorb
influences from each other and develop into new hybrid languages.
English itself is practically a hybrid of German and French, as I
already pointed out.

To be honest, it really seems to me that you are talking about things
that you really don't know that much about. It's okay to do that as
long as you don't pretend to know more than you actually do.

Martin

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