Further evidence of the demise of English as world language

[Wilson Gray]

_Amusing_

That's the point, Mark, except that the owners of the Basque-language
international bookstore, Elkar, are not speaking. They're writing.
Hence, they have plenty of time to find or make up the correct word in
their own language, in Spanish, or in French. But they chose to use
English. You've been to California, no doubt. There you'll find that
code-swithching between Spanish and English by Chicanos is
stereotypical, thickly larded with technical terms like "at home,
payday, beach, weekend, sports section," random brand names, English
proper names, or whatever. Indeed, it's typical of the
Spanish-speaking community, regardless of origin, so that you hear BE
mingled with Spanish by those "Spanish," as they're referred to in BE,
who live in or near the 'hood.

But I can't really believe that you believe that I believe that these
trivial notes of mine are any kind of contribution to scholarly
discourse, worthy of thoughtful discussion and reanalysis and
deserving of counterexemplification.

You're just messing with me, right?
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain


On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 3:30 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > _Amusing_, but just a borrowing of a technical term not in the host
>> language's
>> > vocabulary.
>> >
>> > Working at Honeywell Bull, in Billerica, Mass. in the 1980s, I often
>> heard
>> > conversations between engineers in Chinese, thickly larded with words
>> like
>> > "code" and "subroutine".
>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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