Re: Gothic prestige and borrowing

Piotr wrote:
<No _essential_ disagreement here, but I think you overestimate the
importance of "effective communication". I agree that the explanation of
directional borrowing in terms of "prestige" is often circular. So, alas, is
explanation in terms of communicative needs.>

Piotr, if two people are speaking to each other and neither are using
"prestige" words they should get along just fine. If neither is
communicating, on the other hand, their language is useless. There is
nothing circular about that. I cannot believe that with your obvious writing
skills you wouldn't immediately endorse the priority of communication. The
Mainstream Linguist Police must be lurking around here somewhere.

<<Did Chaucer and other Middle English writers use French words to improve
communication with fellow Englishmen? There's little reason to think so.>>

Yikes! Actually there is every reason to think so. The remarkable
masterpiece that is the Canterbury Tales carries no excess baggage. Every
word is efficient, effective and advances meaning. There is no indication of
a word chosen because it was the "prestigious" word. Chaucer used the right
word to convey pin-point meaning - in English - even though it might have
been a borrowed word. And the reason he could do that was because English
finally had the tools (including the borrowed ones) to tell that story. If
you'd like to substitute "Saxon doublets" into Chaucer (or Shakespeare) be my
guest. But don't expect it to tell the same story. Or tell it very well.

A good example of how much English had been powered up thanks to its
borrowing is Poul Anderson's essay "Uncleftish Beholding" which describes
"Atomic Theory" using "only Anglo-Saxon words" and is reproduced in part on
the web. The Journal of Irreproducible Results in 1979 noted that "essay"
was "legendary among physicists because of how well it illustrates the total
inadequacy of naked 'English' in communicating modern scientific concepts..."
Naked English here meant English without words borrowed from Latin, Greek,
French or Arabic.

Piotr wrote:
<<Innumerable French loans replaced perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon
synonyms...>>

Piotr, don't believe it for a minute. The words you list were not
equivalent. That is an artifact of dictionary definitions and convenience.
When you look at context, you can see that these words served different
functions and had different connotations from the start. The "substitution"
actually reflected material changes and new meanings in English culture at
the time. Calling them "perfectly functional Anglo-Saxon synonyms" is just
not accurate.

Here are just three examples, but I'm sure this can be done with every
two-some you mentioned. In each case, the new borrowed word signaled a
change in meaning and context that did not merely replace the old word:

Arn > Eagle
"Erne/eagle give all the indications of initial usage in English as two
different words. Of the earliest references given to "eagle" in the
OxEngDict almost all refer not to the bird in the wild, but to foreign coins,
emblems and symbols. The main exception seems to be Wyclif (c.1380) who used
both words in his sermons, Eerne and Egle, suggesting that he may have
thought they were two different birds. Since most Englishmen would rarely
see the native erne in its limited native habitats and possibly did not know
it was the same bird, it is logical that the word associated with the more
common imported symbols - eagle - would eventually prevail."

Inwit > Conscience
"Some of the earliest references to "inwit" in ME already attempt to make it
equivalent to "conscience", but it is clear from the texts that was not the
case. Wyclif uses "inwit" as the five "inwyttys" ("Wyl, Resoun, Mynd,
Ymaginacioun and Thogth...") and also as equivalent to the Christian soul
itself. There are many other examples which make any simple equivalency to
conscience unacceptible. This is also clear in that conscience is attested
before "inwit" in MEnglish, but in OEnglish, inwit meant "deceit" - which
seems a pre-Christian notion that directly conflicted with the Christian conc
ept of conscience. It may be that early sermoners substituted conscience for
inwit in order to attempt a "conversion" in thinking in their listeners.
What we may actually have here is an overall change in ethical concepts, with
inwit eventually losing usage because its actual common meaning was ethically
ambiguous, though its most accurate early sense was retained in modern
English "wits" and "wit," neither of which have ethical connotations."

Eme > Uncle
"Under civil and canon law, "avunculus/uncle" denoted only the mother's
brother and demarked the rights and duties of that person in the event of the
father's death. This may be the source of the early use of "to uncle" as
meaning to cheat or swindle, as an "uncle" could divert the normal course of
inhertance . There is no indication that such rights and duties existed under
Saxon law in the designation "eme." Thus, when English written law revised
the rights of inheritance, it extended the legal status of "uncle" to mean
both the lines of mother and father."

I'll try to get to the rest of your post later.

Steve