Re: [tied] Re: language shift ( it was Celts & Cimmerians)

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> One could also consider the spread of Spanish, Chinese (peaceful
> spread my foot), Arabic, not to mention smaller scale displacements
> such as Hungarian, Turkish or even, so it seems, English in much of
> England.

So far I know in China are a lot of languages and they are not mutual
inteligible. The oficial language is / is based on the Mandarin dialect.
For spread of English and Spanish, Russian we discussed and there are
other conditions which cannot apply to the ancient societies. The
question is more interesant when we speak about spreading of Arabic.

>> - any "new language" appeared in the geographical space where these
>> aborigines are living?
>
> You mean like Afrikaans? Do creoles like Sranam interest you? I
> don't think Strine (= Australian English) counts as a new language.
> (It does appear as a language choice in Microsoft Office, though.)
> However, a godd Portuguese textbook will frequently have to refer to
> differences between Brazilian and Portuguese Portuguese. Listening
> to some varieties of US English can be quite a strain for an
> Englishman.

Did someone said the creole have an another status here? I don't know
exactly the messages in the archive but there has been a fine disucttion
about creole.

>
>> - have been there traced morphological, phonological and structural
>> changes which happened to the language of the aborigines due the
>> influence by the language of the new comers?
>
> I suppose the best test case would be Guarani. That's a vigorous
> Amerindian language, whose speakers are bilingual in Spanish.

> Richard.

bilinguismus: what is considered to be bilingual? To use "home" two
languages or to be able to speak an another language id necessary? My
child speaks with me Romanian and with his mother German, thus he is in
my opinion "bilingual".

Alex