05-01-04 14:40, tgpedersen wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
> <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>> 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.
The development of Middle English literacy was a "grassroots" movement,
not something imposed by the speakers of uppercrust English. When
Chaucer caricatures the speech (yes, SPEECH) of a Northern yokel
character, he uses dialectal vocabulary, morphology and phraseology, but
he doesn't show us a creole-speaker who uses something qualitatively
different from written English, in structural terms. That's negative
contemporary evidence, if you need any.
> 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.
You haven't read enough, and not the right stuff. Such variants have
been around in English for a long time, and they've been recorded in
writing throughout that time:
Be thou ashamed that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment, ...
[William Shakespeare, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ V/4]
Shakespeare also wrote <forsook> for <forsaken> quite frequently. In
earlier English fully regularised <taked> can also be found. Note that
from Middle English down to our times we have a lot of records of
non-literary language: witnesses speaking in court proceedings, business
correspondence (sometimes by half-literate businessmen), private
letters, etc.
> Your "standard view" entails two creolisations of Northern
> Germanic/English, mine one. I can claim Occam on my side too.
I don't accept your private usage as regards "creole" and derived terms.
According to my view, neither Proto-Germanic nor Old English were
creolised. Not even once.
> It didn't save the case systems of Bulgarian and Macedonian. And in
> those cases we what the cause was: Admixture of Turkic-speakers.
I'd rather say, areal diffusion of morphological traits. Not all contact
effects consist in creole-formation. The elimination of case forms was a
prolonged and gradual process in Bulgarian, just as in English. It began
about 1100 and reached completion about 1400. The earlier absorption of
a Turkic (Old Bulgar) speech community did not "creolise" Slavic
Bulgarian. Note, by the way, that while the Bulgarian/Macedonian
dialects lost their declensions, their conjugation is exceptionally rich
and more conservative than anywhere else in Slavic!
> 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?
No two languages derived from a common source will develop in the same
way. Too many different factors, internal as well as external, are
involved for the process to be deterministic. I don't think Celtic has
anything to do
Piotr