Rusglish

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Steve Marder wrote:

> Fair is fair, so why not go in a different direction — "рунглийский"
> ("rungliyskiy")!? For a classic (too-good-to-be-true?) example, try this:
> 
> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoH0rdgRi2w>

An excellent example of the code-switching mentioned by Alina.

But my favorite part is right at the beginning, when the interviewer 
asks, "почему вы предпочитаете работать с этим челоеком?" It's perfectly 
normal, так гоорит каждый, but I always get a kick out of this elision, 
just as I do when I hear a Pole say "w uniwerstecie" or "w urstecie." It 
feels like I'm privy to some inside stuff I'm not supposed to see. ;-)

To respond to Alina's remarks about hideousness...

Each of us naturally has certain tastes and preferences, and what I 
think is hideous is (by definition) hideous for me. But if there is 
broad consensus within a linguistic community that something is hideous, 
that constitutes part of the grammar of that language ("grammar" in the 
broad sense used by linguists to denote the entire linguistic 
competence, not merely traditional syntactic rules). And this part of 
our grammar affects which borrowings are successful and which are 
destined to fail -- a borrowing that doesn't suit our common tastes, our 
joint sense of what our language is and how it works, is unlikely to 
catch on, at least without modification. Hence we have lahngeray, not 
langeree, and sputnik, not spootneek, and so forth.

I find it interesting that French, German and Russian (among others, I'm 
sure) find English so "cool" that they are borrowing from us wholesale; 
I've never been a member of a linguistic community that had these 
"aspirations." English has always had high enough status already, at 
least during my lifetime, so we haven't had to look elsewhere for 
coolness (things would have been different for the centuries following 
the Norman Conquest). On the other hand, some will readily point out how 
much we've borrowed in the past few decades from various nonstandard 
dialects when they were associated with popular musical idioms. I wonder 
if this has something to do with our ongoing loss of strong verbs 
("pled"!), Latin and Greek plurals ("memoranda"! and data are!), the 
pluperfect, etc.

Returning to "Rusglish," my intuition is that many English speakers will 
agree that this an ugly word, and it is unlikely to catch on. For me, 
there is no /g/ in "English" (I have /ɪŋ.lɪʃ/, not /ɪŋ.glɪʃ/, despite 
/æŋ.gloskæsən/), so the coinage inserts an imaginary consonant. It may 
also matter that I grew up on Long Island, where the insertion of /g/ 
here and in /lɔŋ.ailənd/ was strongly deprecated. How biased my judgment 
is remains to be seen.

-- 
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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