--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alex" <alxmoeller@...> wrote:
> 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.
There are the Chinese 'dialects' - I'm not sure how parallel they
are to non-Romanian Romance, but there are also many unrelated or
distantly related languages spread across Southern China. The
unrelated languages belong to the Daic and Miao-Yiao (a.k.a. Hmong)
groups. There are also non-Chinese Sino-Tibetan langauges. These
languages appear to be remanants from before Chinese conquests and
settlements. In other parts, there are also, of course, the more
recent settlements of the Turkic, Mongolian and now Tibetan
regions. There's also the phenomenon of Manchuria - the Manchus
conquered China, but then adopted Chinese themselves!
> 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.
> > I suppose the best test case would be Guarani. That's a vigorous
> > Amerindian language, whose speakers are bilingual in Spanish.
> 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".
Yes, except that there is actually a good chance that your child's
Romanian vocabulary will be severely deficient - or does he speak
Romanian outside the home?
Reverting to Guarani in Paraguay, I'm inclined to stick
with 'bilingual', although I do find conflicting reports. As to
necessity there, see the anecdote at
http://wais.stanford.edu/Paraguay/paraguay_guarani.html .
Another bilingual instance would be Welsh. What sort of influence
has English had on authentic, Modern Welsh (we have at least one
speaker of such Welsh on the list) as compared with written Welsh?
Some features are difficult to assess - the ongoing reduction
of /xw/ "chw" to /w/ in South Walian might be regarded as an areal
feature parallel to the English change /hw/ > /W/ > /w/, rather than
as straightforward English influence.
Richard.