05-01-04 12:07, tgpedersen wrote:
> But don't forget that "Middle Dutch" and "OE" are defined by the
> contemporary _written_ sources.
But there is historical continuity between the grammar of OE, ME and
_spoken_ as well as written Modern English. You can see in the
historical record how the case inflections were gradually merged and
dropped, how archaic patterns gradually went out of use (but leaving
traces even in Modern English!), and how the syntax evolved to
compensate for morphological losses. Canonised literary languages like
Mediaeval Latin of Classical Sanskrit don't evolve like English did in
the Middle Ages. I suppose you have no familiarity with Old or Middle
English. Both had numerous dialects whose features are well reflected in
the usage of scribes. 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.
> Logically, nothing prohibits the
> assumption of a continuity between the formation of a "Germanic
> creole" in the Nordwestblock around the last century BCE and the
> first century CE and the appearance of it in written sources some ten-
> fifteen centuries later, given the upper-crust provenance of our
> sources.
What prohibits the assumption that the Anglo-Saxons spoke mostly
Etruscan whereas they wrote Old English? Ockham's Razor.
> If not, why don't the Slavic languages go through a similar
> devcelopment?
Because the edge conditions are not identical. Morphological development
depends on a whole bunch of factors, including phonology for instance.
For one thing, because of its different phonetic nature, Slavic
accentuation did not do much damage to final syllables, so, on the
whole, Slavic morphology has come through almost unscathed (at least in
comparison with Germanic).
Piotr