Re: [tied] Re: Creole Romance?

At 5:41:23 AM on Saturday, July 5, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:

> Perhaps this example can shed some on what I mean.

> This is from a preface Caxton wrote to a book he printed:

> / For we englysshe men / ben borne vnder the domynacyon of
> the mone, whiche is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge /
> wexynge one season / and waneth & dyscreaseth another
> season / And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one
> shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes
> happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in
> tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into zelande / and
> for lacke of wynde, thei taryed atte forlond, and wente to
> lande for to refreshe them: And one of theym named
> sheffelde, a mercer, cam in to an hows and axed for mete:
> and specyally he axyd after eggys: And the goode wyf
> answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the
> marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe,
> but wolde haue hadde egges / and she vnderstode hym not /
> And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren
> / then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel / Loo,
> what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren
> / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / by cause of
> dyuersite & chaunge of langage.

> (See BTW message 6317).

> Caxton is obviously worrying about what is the right form
> of English.

I would say rather that he is concerned to use a version of
English that will be understood as widely as possible.

> Note some of my favorite hobby-horses: The mercer, who is
> used to trading, uses plural -s, the wyfe is not
> indifferent but indignant that someone should speak to her
> using plural -s

This is a considerable misrepresentation of the passage.
The difference between <egges> and <eyren> goes far beyond
the nature of the plural inflexion. We are not told that
the wife was indignant at all; the merchant was angry
because his perfectly good English (from his point of view)
had been dismissed as incomprehensible French.

> (note the similar reaction in the Rhine-German 'doktors'
> case), and we know the outcome, in no small measure due to
> people like Caxton who eventually decided that -s was OK,

By Caxton's day the weak plural was pretty much confined to
the southern dialects, as I recall, especially southeastern.
By the way, in those dialects there was a also quite a bit
of analogical regularization, but it went in the other
direction, in favor of <-en> plurals.

> You might even interpret the story to mean that as late as
> in Caxton's time, people in England used one language at
> home and another, more regular one in the market.

Whether any of them did or not, there's nothing in Caxton's
story that suggests such an interpretation.

> I know that traditionally -s plural is considered a
> Northern thing,

Naturally: it is. And since the Northern dialects of Old
English lost word-final /n/, generalizing the <-es> plural
made good sense, especially after word-final schwa also
dropped.

> but that's also where the markets (and Norse villages)
> were.

There were markets all over -- probably more in the south,
given the distribution of population. London was the only
city of any size even in the late 15th century.

Brian