[LINK] Prince Edward Island French
May. 29th, 2005 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFollowing link after link, I came to an interesting October 2003 post from Language Log on Prince Edward Island French.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but when a language's speakers borrow that much grammar and vocabulary from another language, isn't that usually a sign of the first language's imminent death?
According to Ruth King's plenary address at NWAVE32, preposition-stranding infiltrated Prince Edward Island French in a shipment of infected lexical borrowings.
King started from the fact that sentences likeLe gars que je te parle de ...
the guy that I you talk of
"the guy I'm talking to you about ..."
Quelle heure qu'il a arrivé à?
what time that he has arrived at
"what time did he arrive?"
which are unthinkable in standard French, are normal and common in some (but not all) varieties of Canadian French.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but when a language's speakers borrow that much grammar and vocabulary from another language, isn't that usually a sign of the first language's imminent death?
