Re: English as a creole.


"Darkstar" <darkstar100@xxxxxxxx> wrote...
On Jul 3, 1:17 am, "Douglas G. Kilday" <fufl...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Darkstar wrote:

> Modern English is just an Old-Norse-to-Old-English creole with > French
> borrowings. (But not an out-of-French creole (!) as Charles-James > N.
> Bailey and Karl Maroldt pointed out.)
> Oh yes, it's been discussed before, it's almost classics, but I > just
> can't help going back to it. I think this discussion could still > make
> a nice change.

> 1) At least 6 lexemes from Old Norse in the 100-word Swadesh list
> (day, bark, belly, die, egg, skin, snake) as compared to just 2-3
> French loanwords (mountain, person, round).

A good point. But not a point in favor of creolization.

Actually, 8 (+give, neck?). The problem here is that (as I've already
metioned a couple of times) we tend to overestimate the normal ability
of a language to borrow-replace original words. It's not normal for a
language to replace a basic vocabulary items, especially words
extremely similar to the new ones (raise, silver, egg, skirt) or modal
and auxiliary words (want, are, get, same, both, again), or pronouns
(they, their), or days of week (Thursday =Thor's Day) or names of
simple objects (window, snake, cake) or family terms (sister, husband)
or grammatical endings (-s). If this is happening, it's not just a
sporadic language contact, but rather a prolonged bilingualism with
code-switching and huge interference between the two languages, when
speakers no longer feel the difference between them in everyday
speech. This does not make out a good case for creolization, but does
provide evidence for massive bilingualism and language merging.

> 2) Drastically simplified morphology and fixed word-order with > rather
> weird and often unique analytical constructions ("do" in questions,
> "used to" for imperfectum, "going to" for future tense, etc). > Features
> typical of many creoles: SVO, definite/indefinite/zero articles, > tense-
> modality-aspect [past-present-future; can-do-may-must-shall-should
> (showing modality in a very peculiar way); > progressive-perfect-simple
> aspect], mirrored passive, etc.

Since "use" is a French loanword it seems rather unlikely that an
Anglo-Norse creole would have incorporated it into its conjugational
system.

Also "move", "care", which sound "typically English" nowdays. Looks
like French was by no means unimportant, but mostly in the
superstratum only - in the layer above the informal speech, that is.
As to the Swadesh list, "mountain" was borrowed because there are no
mountains in Britain, so it was a natural loanword, while "person" is
still synonymous to "man" up to these days. I'm not sure even about
"round" (could it be an Old English word? Cf. German "rund").

And there is nothing weird about expressing the future with
"going to"; this happens all over the place.

Where outside the Romance languages?

> 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.

Profound phonological changes do not require creolization.

If they're sudden and happen in just 200 years, they probably do.
Something drastic and abnormal happened at the time. That could make
out a case for partial creolization.

Have you already forgotten about Armenian?

I don't see how it fits into this topic... No, I have finished my work
on Turkic-Armenian regularlexical correspondences. Now I'm just taking
a break.

> 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.

If creolization was completed by 1220, what is Chaucer doing some 150
years later with such Germanic inflectional features as the strong
(ablauting) verb and the strong/weak declension of adjectives? I hate
like hell to sound like Mr. Daniels, but do you know what a creole is?

Initially, I used to call it "semi-creolization". It could have been a
multistage process which took several generations and many migration
waves. Of course, it couldn't be as simple as an over-night event.
Chaucer could speak one variety in the south which was influenced by
multiple migration waves arriving from other areas. Some processes
were in situ, patterned on nearby pidgenization. The Old Norse
speakers continued to coexist and brought more and more changes each
generation. Something to that extent.

I advise you to acquaint yourself with Kaufman's work on Norse influence on English -- it's dealt with in the book Brian recommended.

> 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.

French loanwords in Middle English do not imply creolization, any more
than Greek loanwords in Latin do.

Not all of them, but just those which replaced common lexemes that had
existed in Old English. Such as "use", "care", "move", "approach",
etc. Some substratum words were suddenly lost and had to be borrowed
from other sources.

> 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.

The economic situation improved, and as a result the upper class
started speaking a low-class pidginized language? Golly gee!

The Old Norse speakers got rich and moved into the upper class. The
High Middle Ages was the period when early "capitalism" (free market
economy, that is) first emerged in Europe. A farmer raises pigs, and
then buys a tavern, or becomes a robber and buys a castle, and the
next thing you know he's his a duke and talking "ugly English" in
London palaces. Or his grand-grandchildren do...

> I see no problems with this theory (it explains a lot of things)
> except that the word "creole" is sometimes derogatory. [So why do > many
> native English-speaking linguists reject this idea? Just because of
> "political correctness"?]

I am not a linguist, but the reason they reject this idea is probably
that they know what pidgins and creoles are. And "creole" in a
linguistic sense is not derogatory.

Okay, not a pure, complete creolization, then. A complex, multistage
process very similar to creolization.

> I'd also keep in mind that Vulgar Latin could have formed in a > similar
> way (as Roman slaves were acquiring Latin), hence the famous
> simplifications in Romance languages. So the phenomenon might be > more
> common than we tend to believe.

All the Romance languages I have studied retain the subjunctive/
indicative distinction inherited from Latin. What has been simplified
in going from L to R is primarily the declensional system. The
typical verb in Spanish, French, or Italian is at least as complex as
its Latin counterpart. Whatever you have in mind by "Vulgar Latin",
there is no basis for deducing a phase of creolization.

Some declension endings were getting lost as early as 70 AD (judging
from Pompeii grafitti and other similar informal sources)...
Is it possible to explain the similarities between the Romance
languages other then by assuming they come from a single source which
was subject to some kind of simplification process? The matter seems
to be sort of obscure... How about the triple Korean-Austronesian-
Chinese nature of Japanese, btw? Just another possible instance of a
strange language merger.

Eh? It's generally (?) accepted that proto-Japanese came to Japan from Korea with the Yayoi culture around 2400 BC, so the connection with Korean is reasonable enough. However there's no real evidence of the influence of any substrate corresponding to the languages spoken by the people who lived there during the preceding Jomon period -- which languages could, no doubt, have been related to Austronesian, and/or Ainu, though it's much more likely, IMO, that they belonged to language families which are now extinct.

The "merger" with Chinese, of course, happened thousands of years later -- just as in your discussion of English (only more so) you're conflating things that happened at very different times.

What about your favourite Armenian? Rather extreme sound changes (much greater than English), extensive lexical borrowing (much more than in English), considerable grammatical reorganisation (much of it associated with loss of final syllables), and development of more fixed word order (SOV). Guess it must have been a creole too.

Except that, just as with English, the timing of these various changes doesn't stack up.

John.

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