Re: [tied] Middle English Plurals

From: tgpedersen
Message: 29833
Date: 2004-01-20

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> 06-01-04 15:46, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> >> Neither is a creole phenomenon.
> >
> > An authoritative statement.
>
> I just don't want to engage for the nth time in the same dispute
about
> terms. "Creolisation" was a buzz word in ME studies in the 1970s
and
> 80s, after the publications of C.-J. N. Bailey & Karl Maroldt,
Patricia
> Poussa, Jim Milroy, and several other people. The idea that ME was
> creole was soon falsified and refuted, to most people's
satisfaction, by
> others, especially Manfred Görlach and Sarah Thomason & Terence
Kaufman
> (some of their arguments were summarised for you by Brian, I
believe, in
> one of earlier occurrences of this neverending thread). The useful
> effect of the "creolisation" debate is that people have become more
> aware of creole studies and gained a much better understanding of
what a
> creole is and how to recognise one when you see it. You didn't
follow
> the debate, so I wouldn't blame you for obfuscating things that
other
> people have done their best to clarify, but perhaps you ought to do
some
> reading before advancing a hypothesis already advanced thirty years
ago,
> thoroughly discussed and abandoned by most experts in the field. As
> things are, you're reinventing flogiston.

Just received Thomason & Kaufman: Language Contact, Creolisation, and
Genetic Linguistics
"We rather suspect that some of the writers whoes interpretation of
the history of English we are objecting to might interpret the
evidence from Dutch, Low German, Danish, and Swedish as being
evidence for "creolised" stages in these languages' developments:
however, such a use would rob the term "creolisation" of its
distinctive content [a description of which you'd have to look for
elsewhere in the book], and certainly we do not use the term in the
way theses authors do. The languages in question were not colonised
in quite the same way that English was by Norse and French (though
Flanders was dominated by France, and parts of Scandinavia by Low
German speakers. Our point is this England is not significantly more
simplified or foreignised than Danish, Swedish Dutch or Northern
[sic] Low German."

I've seen this argument before. Wrt to Scandnavia being dominated not
quite in the same way, that's become a topos in English; people seem
to copy it from each other. That is not true. Denmark ceased to
exist. It was re-united by Valdemar Atterdag after an interregnum, in
which it was ruled by Low German speaking counts from Northern
Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Atterdag_of_Denmark

This meant of course the demise of the class who used written Danish.
His daughter Margrethe eventually became ruling queen of Denmark,
Norway and Sweden. The written language(s) of her bureaucracy became
the standard in her time.

Never mind that.

T & K use the term "simplification and foreignisation". As they
describe it, the reason English can't have been creolised is that in
a contact situation, speakers of two _similar_ languages will not
start using a pidgin to communicate (so there's no starting point for
the creation of a creole); and that many of the Germanic languages
around the North Sea (besides English) have simplified and
foreignised in the same way, and that some of them have not been in
contact (unlike English) with a significantly different foreign
language. Therefore the simplification that's has taken place in
those other languages are _not_ examples of creolisation, and so
those of English aren't either.

The part about speakers of similar foreign languages not pidginising
to be understood I am not that sure about. I seems to me that I would
be possible for at least some Danes and Swedes to speak pidginised
versions of each other's language to communicate (but it would be
considered very rude). Never mind that too.

T & K list 20 features that the various simplified Germanic languages
(including English) around the North Sea share (more or less). In
their eyes this gets English in the clear; since these
simplifications occur also in other languages that process in English
is "normal". But it doesn't seem to occur to them that that whole
block of languages itself is in need of an explanation: Why there and
then, and nowhere else in Europe?

Not quite so, actually. Anatolian Greek has lost gender distinction
under the influence of (genderless) Turkish (superstrate). Some
inland Brazilian Portuguese dialects have lost gender under the
influence of Tupí and Guaraní, one Latvian dialect spoken on Livonian
substrate has lost all gender distinction (all examples from T & K)
Now the question is: could there be a substrate influence in all
these languages and what could it be? Perhaps Nordwestblock?

Dutch is inside the Nordwestblock (one might argue that Holland and
Flanders are the continuation of the Nordwestblock, which thus
becomes their "secret identity" ;-)), Western Low German is too,
Eastern Low German (Mecklenburgisch etc) is the result of Flemish
colonisation of former Slavic lands and those Anglo-Saxons that
colonised England came mainly from within the Nordwestblock area.
That leaves Scandinavia. The furthest "simplification" has taken
place in Vestjysk (West Jutland), with degree of simplification
decreasing as one moves further north. There might have been a
different substrate language in Scandinavia, but that matters little
if the Germanic language when arriving already had some "simplifying"
speakers.

So, yes, I think it's a substrate thing. That means that there was a
pidgin situation, but it didn't take place in England. It took place
centuries before, during the expansion of Germanic into the
Nordwestblock.

Torsten