When a Parent Becomes a Daughter

[Stefan Georg]

>In very, very rare cases, a single inflectional morpheme might have been
>borrowed; it's been claimed that English 3sg. -s (replacing -eth)
>represents a Norse influence.  But there is not one recorded case where a
>whole system of inflectional morphology has been borrowed; it just
>_doesn't_ happen.

Oh, it *does* happen; not so tremendously often, actually, but it does. I
was raised myself in lx. believing that there's no such thing as  a "mixed
language", but there are such things. The most famous cases which have been
brought to attention in the last decades are the Aleut variant spoken on
Mednyj Ostrov (which remained lexically basically Aleut and glued Russian
verbal inflections to its roots); other examples include the notorious
Inner Ma'a/Mbugu of Kenya (Cushitic/Bantu lexical-morphological mix) and
some others, now prominently described in the literature. In fact, a lot of
others.

The moribund Moghol language of Afghanistan (Mongolian lg. family) shows
many morphological borrowings from Persian/Tadzhik, inflectional elements
among them; the same holds for the more northerly dialects of Tadzhik,
which seem very prone to adopt Uzbek morphology into their systems. A.P.
Volodin and yours truly may or may not be right in claiming that most of
the inflectional verbal morphology of Itelmen is borrowed from neighbouring
Chukchi-Koryak languages.

I wholeheartedly agree that the role of morphology in the determination of
language relationship can hardly be overemphasized. Sadly enough, this is
not recognized everywhere, with some comparativist schools even explicitly
downplaying this role ("morpho-what ?"). But it is equally incorrect to say
that morphological borrowing doesn't happen. It does.

St.G.

Dr. Stefan Georg
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work:
http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/vtw/Georg/Georg.html