Re: Russian-based pidgins (was: Zelandish)

Hello,

> > Oh! You know about Russo-norsk and Sino-Russian?! That's
> great! I'm amazed! Unfortunately there are very few materials
> on these issues. Do you have / know-where-to-find any in the Web?
> >
> Unfortunately not.  I have seen references to Russo-norsk in
> a couple of
> books in the past.  I don't think I encounter Sino-Russian
> before I read
> Pidgins and Creoles by Ian Holm (I think).  There was a little
> information about both pidgins but I don't think it had anything on
> surzhik.
And rightly so. The surzhik is nowhere near being a pidgin. It is quite
truly a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian, forming a bit of a
transitional zone between the two languages. It has a phonoogy different
from both R and Ukr: thus it has [G] instead of R [g] (as do most
Russian proper dialects of the south) and Ukr voiced [h] (forgot the
SAMPA). It has however the Ukrainian [w] instead of
preconsonantal/auslaut [v].  It has no palatalized sibilants and
affricates (Russian has only [tS_j], and Ukr has a whole load of them).
The prosodic patterns are closer to Ukrainian. In morphology, mosr
dialects are closer to Russian than to Ukrainian (thus, no simple future
tense, and most endings usually Russian - like _-ov_ and not _-iv_ in
2nd decl. gen. pl - but of course pronounced [ow]!). The lexis is quite
normal for that region - it shares a lot with Ukrainian and southern
Russian dialects, and thus more like Ukrainian than standard Russian.

But it has a full-fledged morphology, and the source of its lexis is not
one of the languages, but both.

Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad               pavel_iosad@mail.ru

Is mall a mharcaicheas am fear a bheachdaicheas
                 --Scottish proverb

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