[Wikipedia-l] Europanto

Wed Apr 12 23:15:01 UTC 2006

See mr SMH,

It is indeed a linguistic chaos rather than a true language.

We don't have a Wikipedia for code-switching phenomena such as
Spanglish, Franglais, Taglish, and the like; someone did create a
test-wp for Portuñol but whether Portunhol is code-switching or a
mixed language is debatable.

On the other hand, Europanto is not even code-switching because it
often breaks the rules which tend to govern most code-switching.

See http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2005/06/code-switching.html

Sentences which violate the metagrammatical rules of codeswitching
make up for less than 1% of corpus text for code-switching in general,
but I'm pretty sure the rate in Europanto is much higher.

The main rules are basically these:

1. switches happen only between free morphemes -- the free morpheme rule
2. switches happen only when the word order of both languages is in
alignment -- the equivalence rule

This means that you cannot say "J'ai une friend américain" because
French puts adjectives after the nouns they modify while English puts
them before. In such a case the only natural choices would be to say
"J'ai une ami américain" or "J'ai an american friend" (with regards to
the "american friend" part; you could obviously have different
combinations regarding whether you say "J'ai" or "I have", etc)

In Europanto however, it seems like people ignore these rules entirely.

If Europanto is not a fully-fledged contact language variety such as a
pidgin, creole, or mixed language (which it clearly is not because it
does not fit the criteria for any of those), and it is not a
code-switching phenomena (which it is also clearly not), then what is
it?

It seems that the most reasonable way to describe it is a number of
related sociolects of various languages which use foreign borrowings
very very heavily. You can see the obvious grammatical influence of
English in my own Europanto, I'm guessing you can see the grammatical
structure of French in yours, or German in that of a native speaker of
German.

And the only way to get around the rules of codeswitching is to
explain the words from different languages as borrowed words into the
native language, since borrowings are generally governed by the
grammatical rules of the language which is absorbing them.

So on this basis I would oppose a Europanto Wikipedia -- we already
have several Wikipedias in "Europanto". en.wiki is in English, which
is basically English Europanto with less foreign words; fr.wiki is in
French, which is basically French Europanto with less foreign words;
it.wiki is in Italian, which is basically Italian Europanto with less
foreign words; etc.

Mark

On 12/04/06, Marek Najmajer <marqoz at wp.pl> wrote:
> me too!
>
> /marqoz
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Pawel Dembowski" <fallout at lexx.eu.org>
> To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 12, 2006 10:30 AM
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Europanto
>
>
> >> If you say "Ich anderen than cioccolato mas bonbons prefer" no one will
> >> understand either.
> >
> > Actually, I did understand it.
> >
> > --
> > Ausir
> >
> >
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--
"Take away their language, destroy their souls." -- Joseph Stalin