----- Original Message -----
From: "Pavel Iosad" <pavel_iosad@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2002 9:11 AM
Subject: 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
Thank you, Pavel!
You brief description of Surzhik is marvellous! Where did you get the
data?
And voiced [h] is [h\] IIRC.
Yitzik
~~~~~~~~~~~~~