Languages In the World by Julie Tetel Andresen, Phillip M. Carter Read Free Book Online

borrowed but not the words. The Spanglish verb for ‘to call (someone) back’ is llamar pa'tras , possibly a translation of the English way to express this idea. The Spanish verb is devolver la llamada ‘return the call.’ Llamar pa'tras is widespread in the Spanglishes spoken in California, Texas, and Miami, and it is particularly reviled by monolingual speakers of Spanish as an example of the way Spanglish degrades Spanish. From a linguistic point of view, however, these types of lexical phenomena are completely normal.
    (v) Larger phrasal and sentential patterns, also known as syntax . Because English and Spanish have the same basic word-order pattern: Subject–Verb–Object, there is not much pressure on the word order in Spanglish. However, we find that Spanglish speakers tend not to switch languages at locations where the grammars of the two languages do not line up. An important difference between English and Spanish is that in English, adjectives precede nouns, while the opposite is true in Spanish. Thus, Spanglish speakers are unlikely to make switches between nouns and adjectives. ‘Un coche blue’ is as unlikely ‘an azul car.’
    (vi) Other phenomena, generally classed as cultural, such as endearments and terms of address . Clearly, the ‘man’ in an utterance above is borrowed from an English terms of address. In the utterance: “Don't worry mi'jo, te voy a cuidar ” (Don't worry my son, I'm going to take care of you), the term mi'jo is a term of endearment from mi hijo ‘my son.’ The familiar/formal tú/usted distinction in the second singular ‘you’ forms of address in Spanish may be disappearing in Spanglish, such that speakers primarily only use tú . The Spanish plural vosotros ‘you’ is gone completely, just as it has in varieties of Spanish in Latin America. However, respectful terms of address such as don , doña , Señor , and Señora may be used by Spanglish speakers to be polite, even while speaking mostly English.
    In his book Pardon My Spanglish , humorist Bill Santiago quips that Spanglish has “twice the vocabulary and half the grammar” (Santiago 2008). In reality, as the above examples are intended to show, the most competent speakers of Spanglish have the best command of both languages. They make their switches from one language to the other at the point where the words on both sides of the switch are grammatical with respect to both languages. Although we can say that Spanglish is grammatically flexible, the belief that Spanglish is simply a hodgepodge of words with no grammar is a misunderstanding borne out of popular beliefs about what language is or should be.
    We have begun our structural review of the languages of the world with examples from Spanish, English, and Spanglish because we imagine that many of our readers are familiar with these languages. Although English and Spanish have their grammatical and vocabulary differences, they also share quite a lot due to the vagaries of history. For instance, it is a coincidence that both languages form the plural of nouns with a final -s ; the Western Romance languages, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, share this feature, while the Eastern Romance languages, Italian and Romanian, do not. English is a Germanic language, and 1000 years ago only 35% of Old English nouns had the plural ending with a final -s , namely the masculine nouns. About 700 yearsago, these -s plurals started to spread to all nouns and stabilized about 500 years ago, leaving irregulars such as tooth/teeth, ox/oxen, deer/deer, etc. The fact that Spanish and English could both generalize -s plurals in the first place is because they belong to the language stock known as Indo-European. This means both have inherited a cast of structural characters particular to this stock, and the depth of these structural similarities no doubt facilitates the ease of the Spanglish mix.
    Some of