Re: English as a creole.

On 2007-07-02, Darkstar <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

3) Sudden and considerable shifts in pronunciation. Highly developed
one-of-a-kind vocalism (as opposed to the continental High and Low
German consonantism) not typical of any classical IE languages which
indicates rapid and profound phonological changes at on time during
the English history.
4) The Dark Ages of the English (1100-1220) language which provide
little info on its history which occured just after the end of the
Danish conquest (800-1100). Just the right period for the creolization
to happen.

These two points might work against each other a little, since the major
vowel changes that distinguish English seem not to have taken place
until the fifteenth century. There is some evidence for what might be
phonological change in the early Middle English period, roughly
accompanying the weakening of the Old English inflectional system. This
evidence, though, is gleaned from the orthography of late Old/early
Middle English texts, so may be misleading. It's possible that there's
no great shift in pronunciation, just in orthography as Old English
orthographical standards (a word to use carefully) are replaced by
more regional or idiosyncratic transcriptions (of which the Ormulum is
the most famous and meticulous example). The 'rapid simplification'
model may not be that accurate.

5) The enormous amount of French borrowings in formal speech which
were necessary to substitute for the Old English and Old Norse
vocabulary which were no longer in use or nonexistent (cultural
terms). The peak of French borrowings happening c. 1250 AD, just about
the right time.

The rationale behind lexical borrowing is notoriously unclear, and the
available evidence suggests that a model based on necessity (based on
absence or obsolescence of native words) doesn't reflect patterns of
borrowing terribly well. The early chapters of Mugglestone (ed.), 'The
Oxford History of English' give leads to some interesting recent work on
this (esp. the chapters by Townend and Corrie). Dance, 'Words Derived
from Old Norse in Early Middle English' is also worth a look.

Possible mechanism:
As the economic situation in southern England had improved during the
Middle Ages and the Danish was over, the northern Danish settlers from
Danelaw began to move down into southern areas and started speaking a
low-class pidgenized form of Old English, which later infiltrated into
the upper-class and finally displaced French and Old English. Another
branch of this creolized language survived in the form of other
northern English dialects.

While there's evidence of speaker and language contact between Norse and
English (enough to lead some linguists to argue that there likely was a
functioning 'Anglo-Norse' pidgin based on heavy simplification and
codeswitching, much like the English/French/Latin macaronic language of
later medieval business records - see Wright, Sources of London
English), I don't think the extent of that contact was non-trivial
enough to render Middle English a creole. Nor was the contact with
(Anglo-)Norman after 1066, since it is not believed to have survived in
England as a native spoken language, as opposed to a very
context-specific acquired one, for more than a couple of generations
after the Conquest.

None of this should downplay the fact, though, that English has some
important Norse loans - even a pronoun or two - and a lot of French ones
from this period, and that these travelled pretty well (some of the
Norse ones ending up in the south-west Midlands, for example).

Alex
.

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