Hi,
If the world would be flat...
There is a lot that could have happened (and did happen) in a 1000 years.
You mean morphologically more complex?
What are your real, solid arguments for both a pidgin and a creole apart from wild speculation?
Frank
Yawn...I detect a pointless, semantic argument here.
Nobody was actually alive during the transition between OE and early modern English, and in the middle/ early modern period there wasn't whole lot of dialectal documentation going on. Everything is speculation, or tell me otherwise? Have you found that mythical 14th century tape recording? What record of regional variety there is suggests those living furthest from the historical Norse/ OE borderlands spoke the most conservative dialects of English, as one might expect. Logical, isn't it? And Midlands English was simpler too - i.e. if not actually a creole then it had aspects of creole. People who lived at the time said it was possible for both Northerner and Southerner to understand the Midland dialect, but often not possible for Northerner to understand Southerner and vice versa.
Plattdeutsch is simpler than either Dutch or High German, with fewer inflections, less differentiation between genders blah blah blah. It exists where two languages with a degree of intelligibility mix, and it basically forms a continuum, gradully being replaced by more standard forms as one moves east/ west.. Is it beyind the realms of possibility a similar situation existed in early middle England?
There's evidence Modern Standard English descends from Middle English dialects brought to London by a large immigration of Midlanders.
There are documented examples of South Western dialect spoken as late as the 17th century and it still had archaic features and word order - use of the
ge prefix to denote past participle for example. - "Ich was here in Gloucester geboren" - "I was born here in Gloucester"
First, I think we have to understand what we mean by complexity. I take it that what you mean is that Modern English has fewer inflections than Old English. Native speakers of English tend to regard inflections as an indication of a language's complexity, but in fact they are only one aspect of complexity. All languages are equally complex.
No they're not. If you speak to most non-English and non-German speakers trying to learn both languages, they would tell you English is easier, unless they already speak another Germanic language, especially Dutch. English has largely dispensed with gender and the complex declensions which still exist in all other Germanic languages. Even literate, educated Germans struggle to get German right.
Whilst it is likely that Modern English would be more like Modern Frisian if the Viking and Norman invasions had not taken place, I do not think it necessarily follows that it would resemble Modern Frisian. Modern Frisian has moved on from the language that was spoken over a thousand years ago. It has been influenced by Dutch. Even without Dutch influence, it would have changed. Frisian itself has fragmented into mutually unintelligible dialects, mainly because the areas in which it is spoken are geographically separated from each other. The North Sea lies between Britain and Frisia and it is inevitable that, even without contact with Norse and French, English would have gone its own way after more than a thousand years.
Contemporaneous chronicles suggest OE and Frisian were mutually intelligible until the 12 century at least, whereas the language of the Flemings (i.e. Old Dutch) was not. Modern English without French/ Norse influence would probably resemble Frisian more than other Germanic languages, just as Modern English
with those influences does, and modern English without French influence would be more Germanic...it would resemble Frisian.
Whilst this may be the case, it is not necessarily the case. Loss of inflection has occurred in many languages without the sort of interaction you suggest. It has indeed happened in the Scandinavian languages. The interaction may have accelerated the loss of inflections, but then again it may not.
Yes. The loss of inflection has been far greater in English than in other Germanic languages. I agree, Modern Swedish, for example, is far less inflected than Old Norse, but it's also far more inflected than modern English.
Whatever happened, there was never a creole for the simple reason that there was never a pidgin. What may have happened is this: the degree of mutual intelligibility was such that when a Viking met an Angle each had an idea of what the other was talking about, but not exactly what the other as talking about. In particular they may not have got what tense of a verb or what case of a noun was being used. The fact that inflections may have conveyed no meanings, may have encouraged them to be dropped when exchanges took place. It was not I think so much of a case that the two languages mixed, but rather that the invaders then started to speak English without inflections, or at least with less inflections. The language they spoke would have been complete, if not entirely "correct", and so could not have been a pidgin.
OK, perhaps a pidgin and creole is too strong a term. A simplification then.
The number of Scandinavian words in English is just under a thousand. So, whilst the invasion was significant, it was not overwhelming. What is surprising, and languages are full of surprises that no one can explain, is that some of the very commonest words are Scandinavian including some personal pronouns and the word are. English remains a West Germanic language and is not some sort of a hybrid of North and West Germanic languages.
That's kind of an arbitrary figure. Old Norse and Old English shared 80% of their vocabulary at least, so the only words we can definitely atrtribute to Norse are those which we know did not exist in OE but have equivalents in Norse/ modern Scandinavian languages, or words such as "starve" and "die", which had direct equivalents in both Norse and OE, with slightly different meanings, and in mdoern English the Norse meaning has been assumed (i.e. to die of lack of food - in Old English starve just meant to die, as Starben does in mdoern German).
It does seem modern Standard English descends from simplified Midland dialects of early Middle English which came from the traditional Danelaw borderlands. There was a well documented migration of Midland speakers to London in the 13-1400s, and it is also known that their dialects became very prominent in court and commerce during that period.
The evidence that does exist (which isn't huge) suggests that highly inflected, conservative varieties of English were spoken in places such as the south west right up until the 17th century, which, incidentally, is around the time that linguists first recognise and actual English standard.
So this is evidence that the simplified Midlands dialect is the basis of standard English. And the drive behind that simplification was probably the interaction between Norse and OE. What else could it have been?
If you read Chaucer, who spoke a variety of English which was becoming recognisably modern, he documents that 14th-15th century southerners and northerners could barely understand each other, where as Midland dialect was more or less accessible to all. Midland dialect was probably a logical dialect to use to ensure everyone could understand you, hence its eventual adoption as standard.
Maybe pidgin and creole are terms which are too strong to describe the origins of English, but English
has undergone far more simplification than other Germanic languages, and modern English
does seem to descend from a dialect originating at a linguistic border. The interaction at that border probably accelerated the simplification of English from its highly inflected root languages into the much simpler modern standard.
So don't underestimate the influence of the Norse on modern English. Without the French, English vocabulary would still be 90% Germanic, but without the Norse I believe English grammar would still be as complex as that of continental Germanic languages.
After reading this thread I came to a conclusion that every language is a creole, to a certain degree. Modern Greek, modern Hungarian, modern Russian, romance langs., modern Turkish, modern Persian etc. etc. including classical Latin are all simplifications of it's old, more complicated, versions that approx. underwent the same process as English through (contact with/assimilation of) other languages.
