--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
>
> What about natives? The loss of gender makes English a lot easier to
> learn for its natives, but I'm sure it did not occur for foreigners'
> benefit. I think you're greatly overmagnifying the importance of
> foreigners for the development of a language. Just my opinion.
>
> =============
>
> Never forget what the central issues about a language are the
substrates and
> the non native speakers.
> They actually run that particular language. Native speakers are
by-standers.
> This is the Dane Law principle.
>
> A.
>
I don't think non-native speakers "ran" German or Russian, otherwise
these languages would be very different today, wouldn't they? I think
it depends on the language, each language's particular situation.
You are saying that the Scandinavian invaders controlled the
development of English within the Danelaw? I would argue that, as
Brian said, there was mutual influence both ways between Scandinavian
and English, and would also say that I wouldn't go so far as to say
the Scandinavians "ran" English as opposed to "influencing" English.
But I think you're right that that influence was strong, because in
Northumbrian and Midlands texts after the 9th century, which were
probably in the Danelaw or in areas of strong Scandinavian presence,
there is much confusion of grammatical endings, which I would guess
would primarily be due to confusion between English and Scandinavian.
I would imagine that the Scandinavian spoken in these regions also
experienced much grammatical confusion. This scenario could be the
start of the great simplification of English grammar and the loss of
grammatical gender, I don't know, someone has probably written a paper
on it. But I don't know if there's any support here for Torsten's
idea of shibboleth-induced loss of <-s> plurals, which is the original
issue.
However, I did overlook the strong influence of the French on English,
which perhaps could have strengthened the <-(e)s> plurals on their way
to becoming the predominant plural formation (I don't know, of course,
just speculating -- of course there must be many papers on this
issue). However, this would be counter to what Torsten was saying, if
I understood him correctly: according to his argument, the non-native
French would be inclined to use the <-s> plural on virtually all
nouns, where the natives would have a variety of plurals, and then by
shibboleth this overfrequent <-s> plural would be felt to be incorrect
and foreign, leading to drives to correct it and eventually
hypercorrect it until there would be no more <-s> plurals. This seems
to be the exact opposite of what occurred in English, so I don't think
English offers support for Torsten's shibboleth hypothesis (or for
that matter German).
Andrew