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One of the curious pleasures for an amateur linguist is to live (like the majority of the world's peoples) in a bilingual community. In the part of Wales in which I live there is a long and rich tradition of completely mixing the two languages - here (with a blunt language warning) is a sentence I actually heard last night in The Black Lion on Cardigan High Street:
“Well, apparently aeth e lan i’r Wine Bar a cafodd two shades of shit ciccio mas o ‘i, see?”
aeth e lan i'r renders as he went up to the, and ciccio mas o 'i is "kicked out of him"... the conclusion with see? is use of an English lexical item in a characteristic Welsh tag.
After spluttering in my beer, I fell to wondering: does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
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does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
I useta when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ. Back and forth tween Spanish and English three four times in a sentence, with a little adoption of English words into a Spanish inflectional style. I remember the word juquiado in an anti-drug comic book put out by some local governmental organization. It comes from English hooked written Spanish with the Spanish past participle ending. Linguists call the switching back and forth code switching. The juquiado thing is known as Spanglish.
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does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?
Well, yeah. It's more common outside the pale and in the more rural and Gaeltacht areas but my Gaelic isn't good enough to give any examples. However....
There is this pretty good (black humour) joke someone sent me a while back which does offer an example. Translations by PM (or later in the thread).
Bhi beirt fear I.R.A. ag siul sios an bothar i mBeal Feirste agus chonaic siad fear amhain ina seasamh in aice an balla.
Duirt fear amhain ar an fear eile,
"An ceapann tu go bhfuil an fear seo ins an U.V.F.?"
"Knee ceapaim"
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Linguists call the switching back and forth code switching
I'm familiar with this description, but there are other things going on here too ~ the insertion of one language's lexical items into an alternative grammar, the reshaping of meaning of a lexical item... (let's see who was paying attention in other and past threads!)
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Southern Brazil (on the top side of the world nod to our antipodeans) is a melting pot not unlike the US. In the big cities there you'll hear a lot of Portuginglês... I spoke it frequently. In the smaller, more linguistically isolated towns to the extreme south of the country, populated largely by descendents of German and Italian immigrants, what you'll hear largely is wot Mav said: in this case, Portuguese words inserted into grammar of origin. One of my favorite examples of this I heard in a tiny Austrian-settled town called Treze Tilias (Dreizehn Linden), an admonishment to shut the window because the rain was coming in on the sofa cushions: "Fech die janelen, es chuft auf den almofaden!" 
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When I was living and studying in Germany, switching between languages mid-sentence was definitely the norm.
Amongst the foreign students (of all nationalities) it happened because the only common languages were German and English - with varying degrees of fluency. If you couldn't think of the word in whichever of the two languages you happened to be speaking at the time, you threw it in in the other language.
Amongst the English-speakers the most common reason for using the German words/phrase instead of the English was that the meaning didn't readily translate or referred to something very specific and as a result had more effect in its original language.
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Bien, of course, mon chou Quite common in French/English Montréal.
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bel reminds us: Bien, of course, mon chou... Quite common in French/English Montréal.Yeahbut* y'all're hors concours.  ~~~~ *I'm on a non-Mac at the library and don't know how to copyright mav's legitimate claim to coinage.
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I'm on a non-Mac at the library and don't know how to copyright mav's legitimate claim to coinage.
So do what Apple always does and tsuwm.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Heard on the radio this morning: "air minum, obat-obatan, pakaian bekasor whatever."
drinking water, medicines, old clothes or whatever
The presenter was definitely an Indonesian.
Bingley
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Lots of Hawaiian words are dropped into conversation. Those heard most often are :
"The committee appreciates your kokua" (cooperation,help)
"Thank you for sharing your mana" (mana -long final a = thoughts, essence)
"Mahalo for the birthday gift" (Mahalo = thank you)
And the bus at the airport that whisks you from one airline to another is the "wiki-wicki bus." (wiki-wicki = fast)
Then of course there is that lovely word : aloha.
And if you think I am going to type in the half page Pukui-Ebert Hawaiian Dictionary entry on the many meanings of aloha, think again!
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My supervisor's favourite swear is "piss and merdre". (He's an anglo, BTW.)
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My supervisor's favourite swear is "piss and merdre". (He's an anglo, BTW.)
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in Germany[...]Turns of Phrase: Denglisch
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It's open to debate whether this is really an English word, though it has been seen in a number of English-language publications in recent months, because it was actually coined in German. Its first letter comes from 'Deutsch', the German for 'German'. It refers to the hybrid German-English fashionable speech of younger Germans, heavily influenced in particular by American English.
It's perhaps only to be expected that computerese such as 'e-mail' and 'homepage' are standard (even 'computer', which has pushed out the native 'Rechner', and 'webmaster', which is used instead of 'Webmeister'). Outside computing, you may encounter 'contemporary', 'task force', 'party', 'shopping', 'goalgetter', and 'sales' among many others. On German railways, you will find 'service points', 'ticket counters' and 'lounges'.
Many Germans have been angered by what they see as the linguistic imperialism of such imports. Some, such as Eckart Werthebach, the Christian Democrat interior minister, have called for a language purification law to ban them; others have suggested an Academy for the Cultivation and Protection of the German Language, similar to the Académie Française. What annoys them especially is the way that English words infiltrate otherwise normal German sentences. A notable example was a notice seen at a German airport: "Mit dem 'stand-by-upgrade-Voucher' kann das 'Ticket' beim 'Check-in' aufgewertet werden".
This movement wants to impose hefty fines on any German caught using the bastardised tongue known as 'Denglisch'. [Observer, Mar. 2001]
Werthebach's plan has sparked a national debate over whether the language of the printing pioneer Johann Gutenberg and poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe is in danger of being diluted into the German- English mixture now known as Denglisch. [Reuters, Mar. 2001] Excerpt from: WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 230 Saturday 31 March 2001 Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK http://www.worldwidewords.org Mail: editor@worldwidewords.org I particularly love the sign board example! ~ and also the delightful irony of young German trendies adopting 'webmaster' whilst young Anglo trendies might well use 'webmeister'. The webs of linguistic fashion...
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young German trendies adopting 'webmaster' whilst young Anglo trendies might well use 'webmeister'
When I lived in Flagstaff the standard for chicanos was to be known to their chicano friends by the Anglo version of their names and to their Anglo friends by the Spanish version. One person would be, e.g., Ramón to his Anglo friends and Raymond to his chicano friends.
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Turns of Phrase: Denglisch
On the bookshelf: The Joys of Yinglish by Leo Rosten, McGraw-Hill (1989).
Raises a point in connection with bilingual interpolation. We've been talking about the speaker incorporating a second tongue's words; he might instead adopt its characteristic syntax and stress-patterns. Is suspect the latter may be far more common.
You want an example? I'll give you an example.
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irregular verbs too-- play havoc with bilingualism
"you want i should cry?" (instead of Did you want me to cry?)--Did go the emphatic case also creeps in as past tense --for went. We did go to the store last night.
NY has spanglish, and yidish, and italian slang words that i can think of-- that have become part of NY venacular. the most recent influx has been Koreans/chinese/japanese. but so far, i haven't seen any of their vocabulary crossing over, not even something as simple as Hai! the japanese equivient of OK.
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the most recent influx has been Koreans/chinese/japanese. but so far, i haven't seen any of their vocabulary crossing over
I'd say that you were just a skosh wrong here, but that came in during WWII or earlier.
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Funny you should mention Korean, ot... I picked up very little Korean in the time that I lived there, but one word that still sticks with me is "Kapshida" [with the a's pronounced as ah]. It's comparable to the Spanish "Vamonos" and all its inherent meanings - let's go, alright I'm ready, get a move on, get out of my way, et al. Comes in handy, *especially* when no one else understands any Korean. [evil ]
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during WWII and korean conflict, some words did join english, but in the past 20 years, our local school (apx 300 students) has gone from having apx 7 koreans enrolled (about 1 per grade) to have 90-- over 12 per grade...1/3 of the class! this influx should have local kids picking up some korean words.. but i haven't seen it happening yet.
in the past 20 years, there has been a real movement of chinese/korean/japanese from self selected ghettos ("china towns") to main stream neighborhoods. at least in NY
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