Genetic Descent

[Vidhyanath Rao]

I am troubled with the claim that Anglo-Romani is a form of English.
There was paper in the early 70's (72 I think) in Language by Kulkarni
on the language of the Konkan Sarasvat Brahmins. This language is IA,
but has lost many of the IA syntactic patterns that do not exist in
Kannada (the major language of the region where KSB live), with the
Kannada patterns being used instead. Due to the convergence/substratum
influence, the difference between IA and Dravidian was much smaller to
begin with than between English and Romani. But the development is
clear: The patterns of the more frequently used language (Kannda being
used everywhere except when all participants were KSB) crept into the
minority language till the former ousted the latter. [From personal
knowledge the same can be said of Maratti speakers in Madurai.]

H. W. Hatting wrote:
> If this information is correct, English Romani is indeed basically English
> relexified with Romani vocabulary.

But how was the lexicon preserved? That today's speakers just learn the
"code words" does not mean that is how it happened in the first
place. A better hypothesis would be that as Romani became restricted in
use and essentially a "learnt language", the substratum influence of
English caused the grammar changes. That makes Anglo-Romani a dialect of
Romani with strong English influence, rather than English "relexified"
with Romani.

---

I am also uncomfortable with the idea of assigning "verbal morphology"
the primary place in ascertaining genetic relationships. It seems that
verbal categories are subject to remaking as much as nominal categories.
In particular, progressive -> imperfective/non-past and perfect ->
perfective/past seem to quite common, with the antecedents arising quite
often.

Perhaps what is being asserted is that morphemes used in conjugation are
more resistant to borrowing or external influence. This may be the case,
but seems to be arguable given what has been said so far.

Regards
Nath