Re: Yiddish, Ladino, and Code Switching

> Dan Sulani wrote:
>
>     It seems plausible to me that Yiddish, Ladino,
> and other less well known Judeo-x langs began by
> people code-switching between langs.
>     For example, in the case of Yiddish, German and
> Hebrew. As time went on, new generations learned the
> code switching as a native lang. (Code switching
> developing into a creole?) When speakers of this moved into
> slavic speaking lands, they began code switching between the
> German-Hebrew and the slavic langs they now spoke.
Hmm, I doubt that.  Yiddish and Ladino are essentially Mideavil German
and Spanish with influence from Hebrew and Slavic in the case of
Yiddish.  If it had evolved from a code-switching situation, one would
expect a far more equal influence - and indeed, there are some such
examples, I've read of a language spoken in Alaska which was a blend of
Russian and a native language, I'm not clear on the details, but I think
that some inflections were Russian, and some from the native language.
Or, you'd expect a regular creolization to have occured, and the grammar
to be simplified, which, as far as I know, did not occur.

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