Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > What about natives? The loss of gender makes English a lot
> > easier to learn for its natives, but I'm sure it did not occur
> > for foreigners' benefit. I think you're greatly overmagnifying
> > the importance of foreigners for the development of a language.
> > Just my opinion.
> >

It made it easier for the foreigners, and they ran England then.

> > Never forget what the central issues about a language are the
> > substrates and the non native speakers.
> > They actually run that particular language. Native speakers are
> > by-standers.
> > This is the Dane Law principle.
> >
> > A.
> >
>
> I don't think non-native speakers "ran" German or Russian, otherwise
> these languages would be very different today, wouldn't they? I
> think it depends on the language, each language's particular
> situation.

Turkic-speakers 'ran' Bulgarian and Macedonian, and today they have no
case system, unlike all other Slavic languages.

> You are saying that the Scandinavian invaders controlled the
> development of English within the Danelaw? I would argue that, as
> Brian said, there was mutual influence both ways between
> Scandinavian and English, and would also say that I wouldn't go so
> far as to say the Scandinavians "ran" English as opposed to
> "influencing" English.
> But I think you're right that that influence was strong, because in
> Northumbrian and Midlands texts after the 9th century, which were
> probably in the Danelaw or in areas of strong Scandinavian presence,
> there is much confusion of grammatical endings, which I would guess
> would primarily be due to confusion between English and
> Scandinavian.
> I would imagine that the Scandinavian spoken in these regions also
> experienced much grammatical confusion. This scenario could be the
> start of the great simplification of English grammar and the loss of
> grammatical gender, I don't know, someone has probably written a
> paper on it.

I don't think anybody has.
In the situation with OE and ON in Northern England I don't think
there was much confusion, since the two languages were no more
different then than Danish and Swedish today, and Danes and Swedes
trying to intercommunicate using their native tongue do not abandon
grammatical devices of their native tongue (like eg. baby-talking).
It's only when the two languages are so different that one of the
speakers has to switch to a non-native language that grammatical
categories break down, since he won't have any clues from his native
language for the grammatical categories of the language he tries to
speak, like an English-speaker trying to guess the plural type of a
German noun.

> But I don't know if there's any support here for
> Torsten's idea of shibboleth-induced loss of <-s> plurals, which is
> the original issue.

The loss of s-plurals happened in the south, says Brian. They must
have had issues with the Northerners.


Torsten