[tied] Transhumance [Re: etyma for Crãciun]

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 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.

Nothing compared to yours. Do you have any familiarity with the
genesis of a creole like Afrikaans? Stefan Zimmer: "On Language
Genesis: The Case of Afrikaans" is interesting (in "Perspectives in
Indo-European Language, Culture and Religion; Studies in Honor of
Edgar C. Polomé", which contains also, BTW Jarceva: "The Problem of
Existence of the Literary Language in Anglo-Saxon England",
Nielsen: "'Continental Old Enlish' and s-Plurals in Old and Middle
Dutch" and Salmons: "Northwest Indo-European Vocabulary and Substrate
Phonology").

>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.

Since it would be a language of the great illiterate unwashed, by
definition there wouldn't be. And before I actually heard someone in
Iowa say "I have took" for "I have taken", I would have sworn it
didn't exist. I've never seen it in written sources. And someone
whose only source of the English language was movies would believe
that the word f*ck was invented in the seventies.
A girl from Hamburg I dated told me of some acquaintance of her who
was so dumb or unenlightened that he "couldn't tell the difference
between der, die and das". Fortunately I had studied linguistics and
am the proud owner of a Plattdeutsch reader cum grammar for the
Gymnasium, so that I was able to tell her that she was completely
wrong, that he in fact only wasn't able to distinguish accusative
from dative. But then, maybe I was wrong and she was right?

> > 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.

Your "standard view" entails two creolisations of Northern
Germanic/English, mine one. I can claim Occam on my side too.

> > 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).

It didn't save the case systems of Bulgarian and Macedonian. And in
those cases we what the cause was: Admixture of Turkic-speakers.

And why is there no "case system collapse" in former Celtic territory
in Germany, if the initial conditions for the Germanic dialects are
the same?

Torsten