Re: Hybrid language?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Pullman" <tom@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, May 27, 2001 4:17 AM
Subject: Re: Hybrid language?


| --- Danny Wier <dawier@...>
| > wrote:
| >Is the concept of a "hybrid" language a plausible one, even the
| >idea of a language belonging to two families?
| >
| >(English is a hybrid of Germanic and Romance, so I guess it's possible on
that
| >level.)
|
| Well... English is a Germanic language with large amounts of vocabulary
borrowed from Romance. I wouldn't really call it a hybrid - its structure is
rather different from that of Romance languages.
| The only languages I would call hybrids are creoles. For the benefit of those
who don't know about this, I'll explain about pidgins and creoles.

I forgot about thise, creols and pidgins... except most of them are built on one
particular language like English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, with borrowed
words from the other language(s).  Maybe that's what's the case for Ainu (again,
the Ainu spoken in northwestern P.R. China, NOT northern Japan).

Uzbek is also close to being like this, since it's a Turkic language with the
Persian vowel system (no vowel harmony) and a lot of Persian vocabulary.

~DaW~


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