Re[2]: [tied] Middle English Plurals

At 8:52:24 AM on Wednesday, January 7, 2004, tgpedersen
wrote:

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

>> 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). [...]

> You are too kind. As I recall Brian's argument, the
> difference between a creole and a proper language was that
> if enough of the development stages of a language is known
> so that we may follow its development in detail, then it
> is not a creole, otherwise it is.

Evidently you *don't* recall the argument_s_, which, as
Piotr says, are Thomason & Kaufman's, not mine. T&K is not
an obscure work; I'm sure that you can find it if you try.
Or you could apply to the archives.

> In other words the status of a language is determined not
> by a property of that language, but by a property of our
> knowledge of it. This means that if all documents
> pertaining to the development of, say, Middle English were
> burned, English would overnight become a creole, whereas
> if we should happen to find the notes of some misionary to
> New Guinea documenting the develpment of Tok Pisin, that
> language would overnight cease to be a creole.

No.

>> 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?

> No. The South adopted the unpractical <-en> exactly
> _because_ the North adopted the practical <-es>; cf the
> reaction of Caxton's woman.

Drivel. To the (very limited) extent that it permits any
relevant inference at all, the story points in the exact
opposite direction: she didn't even recognize the northern
form. You can't deliberately react against something of
which you're not aware in the first place. The notion of
impractical <-en> and practical <-es> is also drivel.

>> 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.

> "Random evolutionary drift"? Perhaps you should run your
> definition of terms past Darwin first? Or else, if you
> persist in your metaphor, you should offer an explanation
> of how "survival of the fittest" enters into your picture
> of linguistic change.

Perhaps instead you should learn some modern evolutionary
theory. Random genetic drift is now understood to be of
great importance.

Brian