From lojbab Mon Dec 12 13:55:16 1994 Subject: Two languages, one grammar? To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List), conlang@diku.dk From: John Cowan Date: Mon, 12 Dec 1994 13:55:16 -0500 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24beta] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 3148 Status: RO Message-ID: Another tidbit from the same book I've been stealing from lately (>Man's Many Voices<; see "stylemes" posting for ref info): # John Gumperz has examined the colloquial dialects of Marathi and Kannada # in a village along the Maharastra-Mysore boundary in central India where # these two languages come into direct contact. Marathi is an Indo-Aryan # language, while Kannada is Dravidian. Historically these two languages # go back to utterly different antecedents, but the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian # languages have been in contact in India for several thousand years and have # long influenced one another. Along the borders their mutual influence has # been profound. In the village studied by Gumperz most speakers feel # themselves to be bilingual, but the two village dialects share such a # large part of their grammar that one can almost doubt whether they should # count as separate languages. Consider, for example, the following sentence: # # Kannada: hog- i w@nd kudri turg maR- i aw t@nd # Tags: verb suff. adj. noun noun verb suff. pron. verb # Marathi: ja- un ek ghoRa cori kar- un tew anla # English: go having one horse theft take having he brought # Idiomatic English: Having gone and having stolen a horse, # he brought it back. # # All of the morphemes of the Kannada sentence are different from those of # the Marathi sentence, but they are used according to identical grammatical # principles. The sentences have identical constituent structures and their # morphemes occur in the same order. The same kind of suffixes are attached # to the same kind of bases. These sentences seem by no means to be atypical # of village usage. In fact, one can plausibly suggest that these two # languages (if indeed they >are< two languages) have the same grammar and # differ only in the items filling the surface forms. One can translate from # one language to another simply by substituting one set of lexical items for # another in the surface structure. # # Both the Marathi and the Kannada used in this village differ from the more # literary or educated styles of the same languages, but both can be shown to # be related to the more standard forms according to the usual criteria by # which linguists recognize genetic affiliation. Yet the village dialects # have undergone such profound mutual grammatical influence as to almost # obscure the boundaries between the two languages. Curiously, in this case, # it is the lexicon that maintains the separation, and after considering the # effect of Marathi and Kannada upon each other, one can hardly maintain that # lexicon is always the easiest component of language to borrow or that the # true genetic affiliation will necessarily be shown by the underlying grammar. Me again. The relationship of village-Marathi to village-Kannada is oddly like the relation of Lojban to (other forms of) Loglan; shared grammar, utterly divergent lexicon. While the history is quite different, the synchronic situation is very much the same! -- John Cowan sharing account for now e'osai ko sarji la lojban.