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From: alderson@netcom16.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: What is Slavish?
In-Reply-To: mariadas@netaxs.com's message of 30 Oct 1996 05:16:35 GMT
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Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 23:23:46 GMT
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Slavish is the name of a _lingua franca_ based mostly on West Slavic (Polish,
Czech, Slovak) languages, with some South Slavic (mostly Serbian, I think) and
East Slavic (mostly Ukrainian) influence, spoken in areas of the northeastern
U. S. which underwent large immigrations of Slavic speakers in the late 19th
and early 20th Centuries.  The speakers with which I am familiar (by anecdote
of relatives-by-marriage) were coal miners in southwestern Pennsylvania; my
father-in-law, the son of Rumanian immigrants, spoke a bit of Slavish when he
worked in the mines.

I have even read a paper on this _lingua franca_, but although I can remember
the physical appearance of the book, and the paper for which I checked it out
of the library (by Gamkrelidze, on Indo-European consonantism), I can't provide
any bibliographical details.

It may very well be that your friend's mother, if she were very young when her
family emigrated from the Carpathians, was more exposed to this than to any
particular Slavic language.  She was right that is was not a written language,
being a pan-Slavic pidgin; when people needed to write, they tended to do so in
their native languages.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
