Re: Just a Little Taste of Judean (Part 2)

Padraic Brown wrote:
> Why couldn't they?  I'm assuming that these "Judeans" are or were
> originally Hebrew speakers who have adopted the Roman language, likely
> with a certain Greek and Hebrew adstrate.  If Hebrew has the article, they
> certainly wouldn't be borrowing the idea from Latin -- it's already there.
> They may develop or be borrowed from Hebrew or Latin.  Compare with
> English's borrowing of personal pronouns.
Well, English's borrowing of third plural pronouns was quite unusual,
and was due largely to the homophony that had developed between the
third person plural and the singular.  However, getting back to this
Judean, when English speakers learn Russian, they don't start throwing
in the English word "the", even tho Russian has no definite article.  If
there's something that resembles the definite article, like, say, a
demonstrative, they might start "overusing" that.  So that where most
people might just say "homo", they'd say "ille homo", in much the same
way as English-speaking people learning Spanish will overuse the
pronouns, saying "yo como" and the like left and right.  Another (again,
imperfect) example is Japanese, which has begun to acquire third person
pronouns, borrowing the concept from the European languages, but using
nouns meaning (IIRC), something like "that man" and "that woman".  If
this continues, then those may lose all independent meaning and be
solely pronouns.

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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