Clever Turtles

It will be a while before I get to posting regularly, now that I'm transferring to a new country, trying to find housing, and getting ready for grad school.

I thought I'd mention an interesting linguistic note I observed in a student. A Korean-American high school kid who grew up in the US mentioned to me that he and his sister often add '-ing' and '-ed' tense markers to Korean sentences. For example, "I'm studying" could be "난 공부해-ing".

He brought it up in a class with a lot of other students from a similar background, and they all said he was weird, so it's apparently not a common feature of Ko-Am bilingual communities. It's nonetheless an interesting case of borrowed morphology.

I've always suspected that usage of present continuous tenses in Korean and English differ slightly, although I've never been able to pin it down. I think a lot of Ko-En bilinguals tend to calque '-고 있다' with '-ing'; if so, this might be an example where they code-switch might fit in the gap between precise meaning, rather than going with the calque. Which would have interesting implications for an overarching theory of code-switching.

But then again, IANAL [I Am Not A Linguist]. I'm sure I'm breaching sacred and holy rules of contact linguistics.