[tied] Transhumance [Re: etyma for Crãciun]

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 05-01-04 14:40, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> > <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>
> >> Especially written Middle English, because of the collapse of

the

> >> Late OE literary tradition, was a highly variable language,
> >> _without_ a single normative variety. What it reflects is a
> >> multitude of local variants, but there's no trace of your

legendary

> >> creole.
> >
> > Since it would be a language of the great illiterate unwashed, by
> > definition there wouldn't be.
>
> The development of Middle English literacy was a "grassroots"

movement,

> not something imposed by the speakers of uppercrust English. When
> Chaucer caricatures the speech (yes, SPEECH) of a Northern yokel
> character, he uses dialectal vocabulary, morphology and

phraseology, but

> he doesn't show us a creole-speaker who uses something

qualitatively

> different from written English, in structural terms. That's

negative

> contemporary evidence, if you need any.

Northern Middle English uses s-plurals, as far as I know? And what
would the reaction of the average Southern man or woman in the street
at the time be to s-plurals, according to Paxton, if you recall the
story?

>
> > And before I actually heard someone in
> > Iowa say "I have took" for "I have taken", I would have sworn it
> > didn't exist. I've never seen it in written sources.
>
> You haven't read enough, and not the right stuff. Such variants

have

> been around in English for a long time, and they've been recorded

in

> writing throughout that time:
>
> Be thou ashamed that I have took upon me
> Such an immodest raiment, ...
>
> [William Shakespeare, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ V/4]
>
> Shakespeare also wrote <forsook> for <forsaken> quite frequently.

In

> earlier English fully regularised <taked> can also be found. Note

that

> from Middle English down to our times we have a lot of records of
> non-literary language: witnesses speaking in court proceedings,

business

> correspondence (sometimes by half-literate businessmen), private
> letters, etc.
>

Last I mentioned "I have took" on cybalist, an American denied it
even existed.

> > Your "standard view" entails two creolisations of Northern
> > Germanic/English, mine one. I can claim Occam on my side too.
>
> I don't accept your private usage as regards "creole" and derived

terms.

> According to my view, neither Proto-Germanic nor Old English were
> creolised. Not even once.

And I don't see any reason to make a hard distinction between those
phenomena in European and non-European languages; where would that
put Afrikaans (and there's been a long and bitter debate in Afrikaans
over the creole-status of that language)?. Better linguists than
myself have suggested that all IE languages are instances of
creolisation of the original PIE.

> > It didn't save the case systems of Bulgarian and Macedonian. And

in

> > those cases we what the cause was: Admixture of Turkic-speakers.
>
> I'd rather say, areal diffusion of morphological traits.

And what is the big difference?

>Not all contact effects consist in creole-formation.

Who claimed that?

>The elimination of case forms was a
> prolonged and gradual process in Bulgarian, just as in English. It

began

> about 1100 and reached completion about 1400.

It is not "prolonged and gradual" in the speech of the individual
speaker. Cases either are there or they aren't.

>The earlier absorption of
> a Turkic (Old Bulgar) speech community did not "creolise" Slavic
> Bulgarian.

What it probably did was create low, "unacceptable" sociolects, which
gradually "bled through" to the standard language in the next several
centuries.

>Note, by the way, that while the Bulgarian/Macedonian
> dialects lost their declensions, their conjugation is exceptionally

rich

> and more conservative than anywhere else in Slavic!
>

I know.

> > And why is there no "case system collapse" in former Celtic

territory

> > in Germany, if the initial conditions for the Germanic dialects

are

> > the same?
>
> No two languages derived from a common source will develop in the

same

> way. Too many different factors, internal as well as external, are
> involved for the process to be deterministic. I don't think Celtic

has

> anything to do
>

And nonetheless, the border between case-collapsed, person-collapsed
("Einheitsplural") Low German and case-preserving, full-inflecting
High German follows the border between Nordwestblock and para-Celtic
areas. Or Coincidence strikes agian?

Torsten