06-01-04 15:46, tgpedersen wrote:
>> Neither is a creole phenomenon.
>
> An authoritative statement.
I just don't want to engage for the nth time in the same dispute about
terms. "Creolisation" was a buzz word in ME studies in the 1970s and
80s, after the publications of C.-J. N. Bailey & Karl Maroldt, Patricia
Poussa, Jim Milroy, and several other people. The idea that ME was
creole was soon falsified and refuted, to most people's satisfaction, by
others, especially Manfred Görlach and Sarah Thomason & Terence Kaufman
(some of their arguments were summarised for you by Brian, I believe, in
one of earlier occurrences of this neverending thread). The useful
effect of the "creolisation" debate is that people have become more
aware of creole studies and gained a much better understanding of what a
creole is and how to recognise one when you see it. You didn't follow
the debate, so I wouldn't blame you for obfuscating things that other
people have done their best to clarify, but perhaps you ought to do some
reading before advancing a hypothesis already advanced thirty years ago,
thoroughly discussed and abandoned by most experts in the field. As
things are, you're reinventing flogiston.
>
> Followed by a restatement of the traditional position.
>
"Traditional" doesn't mean incorrect.
> Yes, I know, the development of English was driven by perfectly
> natural processes, unlike the development of creoles.
It's a silly game. I've never said the development of creoles is not
natural. What I said in my previous posting was that there was nothing
in the Middle English development that couldn't be due to internal
factors. Why should the generalisation of <-es> have been due to
interaction with other languages? And what about the (eventually
abortive) generalisation of <-en> in the South (which was a process of
the same nature)? Was it due to interaction witha still different
language? You selectively take _some_ features of ME and argue that
since similar features are found in creole languages, English must be a
creole. It's like claiming that since bats have wings, they must be
birds. Remember the Bulgarian example? Bulgarian must have been
creolised, since it lacks noun cases, right? But what about its fully
preserved conjugational categories and inflections? What about its three
genders, etc.? You concentrate on what you think is supportive evidence,
and don't even mention the rest.
> Obviously the
> Germans refused to participate in this perfectly natural process to
> the point of eventually banishing all -s plurals (apart from
> Northernisms and Romance loans). What is the matter with these people?
As I have emphasised many times (check the archives), "natural" is not
the same as "deterministic". English followed one possible path, German
followed another, also a natural one. One reason for the difference may
have been that OHG had the other variant of the strong masculine plural
ending, <-a> from unextended *-o:z, which was less characteristic and
therefore its selective advantage was weaker than that of OE -as, but
such developments may simply be due to a kind of random evolutionary
drift without a clear motivation. /mt/ > /nt/ is a natural assimilation,
but it _doesn't have to_ happen every time you find /mt/ in a language.
A different natural change may occur, e.g. /mt/ > /mpt/, or the cluster
may continue to exist unchanged for ages. One never knows in advance.
Piotr