Hybrid language (Japanese)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gx_b8YNlZBU

If you search through the Language Log archives, you will find a tremendous number of posts listed under creoles, pidgins, "mixed" and hybrid languages and scripts, to an extent that the categories themselves begin to blur.  This leads me to ponder what these fuzzy linguistic boundaries tell us about the nature of language, its history and development.

One type of hybrid language that was particularly important in my research is Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, which reflects a historical shift where Buddhism moved away from local vernaculars and began to use Sanskrit as a liturgical and scholarly "church language". (AIO)  After teaching graduate seminars on medieval Chinese Buddhist texts for decades, in which Indic grammar, syntax, lexicon, etc. played a huge role, in emulation of Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, I began to think and speak of Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic — two BHSs.

 

Selected readings

• "Japanese, Chinese, and English mixed language and script" (2/2/25)
• "Are you OK?" (11/2/25) — with lengthy bibliography
• "Buddhism and languages" (2/28/17)
• Mair, Victor H.  "The Linguistic and Textual Antecedents of The Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish", Sino-Platonic Papers, 38 (April, 1993), 1-95.
• Edgerton, Franklin. Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953