Asian Englishes

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

Grant Barrett <gbarrett at AMERICANDIALECT.ORG> writes (I have filled in some more
of the context)

>>>>>
an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of April 22, 2000:
     http://www.smh.com.au:80/news/0004/22/text/spectrum2.html
by Susan Butler, publisher of The Macquarie Dictionary, concludes with
this list of English as she's spoken in Asia:

PHILIPPINES

>barrio: village

I dunno. Wouldn't that be the Spanish influence rather than the English?
<<<<<

I think the point of the article is influence from other local languages ON the
local English rather than vice versa. In the Philippines, Spanish and English
are both ex-colonial languages. So this is a loanword that has entered Filipino
English from Filipino Spanish, just as you say. It is precisely in line with the
other items, which are evidently either
 - loans (THAI acharn 'teacher') or
 - loan translations (CHINESE [but where?!] jump the dragon gate 'to overcome
obstacles') or
 - adaptations -- what do we call this sort of thing? (PHILIPPINES aggrupation
'political faction', which I am supposing to come from Spanish agrupacion [acute
accent on the "o"]
 - combinations (SINGAPORE/MALAYSIA 'kiasuism: getting the best out of every
deal') or possibly
 - localEng coinages (? TAIWAN tea gathering 'event where light refreshments are
served').

(I suppose PHILIPPINES solon 'a law-maker' is either seen as taken from Spanish
or imagined to be taken from a native language. It certainly has a history in
English in exactly this sense, originating in a classical allusion.)

   Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist and Manager of Acoustic Data
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