Re: English as a creole.

On Jul 3, 5:54 pm, "John Atkinson" <johna...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Darkstar" <darkstar...@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.

Argumentum ad ignoratiam. I don't have the access to that book. What's
in there?


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.

At least, "me" (eye) and "miru" (to look) in the basic vocabularly is
from the SEA languages. There're supposed to be others, too.

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.

Chinese might not have to do anything with creolization, I'll have to
agree to that one.

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.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Armenian is the worst example possible. I'm trying to prove that
Armenian is possibly closely associated with proto-Turkic, and you say
it's a highly divergent variaty of PIE. Armenian doesn't look a like a
normal IE language. Give me some other example.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: English as a creole.
    ... > French loanwords. ... of a language to borrow-replace original words. ... Anglo-Norse creole would have incorporated it into its conjugational ... I advise you to acquaint yourself with Kaufman's work on Norse influence on English -- it's dealt with in the book Brian recommended. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Common Ancestor?
    ... another area where horizontal transfer poses some problems -- namely, ... the development of language. ... English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European ... Borrowings will not exhibit all of the changes above for the simple ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Common Ancestor?
    ... So you agree that such tree cannot hold true if it is "corrupted" by ... the development of language. ... English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European ... Borrowings will not exhibit all of the changes above for the simple ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: English as a creole.
    ... But not a point in favor of creolization. ... of a language to borrow-replace original words. ... Anglo-Norse creole would have incorporated it into its conjugational ... The peak of French borrowings happening c. 1250 AD, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: English as a creole.
    ... The Dark Ages of the English language which provide ... were necessary to substitute for the Old English and Old Norse ... The peak of French borrowings happening c. 1250 AD, ...
    (sci.lang)
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