Birth of Middle English: Creolization or Not ? How may stages ?
Bossel said:
Not necessarily, but it obviously depends on your definition of merging.
Please forgive my lack of imagination-information; what (counter-)examples might there be ?
Bossel said:
This kitchen scene actually might have happened once in a while quite similar to what you described (although the languages involved were very different from what you wrote.
Thanks for not tearing that up; I know you could easily have.
Bossel said:
Here, I have to disagree. There is absolutely no evidence that English went through a stage of pidginisation at that time. I know of some linguistic hypotheses in that direction, but none is very convincing.
Anyway, OE was already on its way to an analytical language long before the Normans arrived. The influence of the Vikings was probably much greater than that of the French Normans.
The Norman-French speakers were a tiny minority, & although a kitchen scene as above is likely to have happened, this involved only very few people in England. The vast majority still spoke English. IIRC, there is evidence that most of the Norman nobility was able to converse in English only some years after the conquest (don't ask me for sources right now, I don't remember. perhaps I find the time to dig for that on Thursday).
Yes, I admit that I have coalesced without support the two ideas of 1) OE-NF langauge contact involving merging and 2) pidginzation-creolization often being the beginning of a new language, which by themselves do not gurantee that Middle English is indeed a product of pidginized-creolized OE-NF. I have since located some supporting/countering theories in this line in S.G.Thomason & T.Kaufman,
Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics:
long quote from Thomason & Kaufman (non-creolists) in summary:
9.8.8 French Influence on Middle English and the Question of Creolization
"In recent years certian scholars esp. Domingue 1975, Bailey and Marlodt (creolists) (in Trudgill ed. 1984) have suggested that
in the contact situations between English and Norse, and also between English and French, pidginization and creolization took place.
...
in the case of Norse-English contact... The very close similarity between the two languages makes the emergence of a pidgin language unlikely on linguistic grounds and social grounds... Creolization is also unlikely on social grounds... too close linguistically for such an extreme response to communication difficulties.
As to whether 'creolization' occurred in England in the contact between English and French could hardly be raised by scholars familiar with the social and linguistic history of England, unless by 'creolization' they understand something greatly different from what we do, something which robs the notion of 'creolization' of much meaning. (lexico's comment: This qualifier is interesting. It suggests that depending on the definition of 'creaolization' OE-NF contact giving rise to ME features is possible.)
Bailey and Marlodt (creolists) 1977 suggest that the linguistic system we know as Middle English is really the result of the massive importation of English lexicon into OF spoken by the upper class medieval England.
...
However, imperfect learning of the requisite degree called abrupt creoliztion always involves several languages, and always involves a forced shift... urgent need for a contact medium in the new multilingual contact situation. The case of the French in England is not a promising place to look for a dramatic linguistic result, with only two languages and ample opportunity for bilingualism to develop-and no question of a socially forced shift that could affect the victorious invaders. Counterpoints to creolization theory:
1. Never many speakers of French in England
2. By 1235, French speakers began giving up French
3. Between 1066-1250 no large proportion of native English speakers learned French.
4. The English dialect most in contact with French experienced no simplification; and remained conservative regardless of the contact
5. Simplifying traits in Standard English were mostly imported from the East Midlands, sometimes from the North.
6. The following changes occurred at a time when there were hardly any competent French speakers for an Englishman to talk to.
6a. (massive) French vocabulary 1200-1400
6b. (mild) French morphology and syntax: particles & derivational affixes
6c. (trivial) French phonology: initial f/v split into f and v
...
In the history of contact between English and French in England there is abundant evidence that while only some English speakers learned French, nearly all Normans and Angevins became bilingual within in less than 250 yrs of the Conquest, and that their French suffered as a result.
...
G.V.Smithers (non-creolist) on the transition from OE to ME:
What marks off Middle English from Old English ? The changes and effects that go really deep...upto and since 1400 are changes in accidence (=inflexion,) referring to the drastic simplification of the system of endings, grammatical gender, and case endings; one commonly thinks of these as the distinctive characteristics of "Middle" English. What one commonly forgets is that they occur in a well-developed stage in the Northumbrian "Old" English of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the late 10th c." (Bennett and Smithers 1968)
Given these facts, it can be in no way considered reasonable to suppose that any of the conditions for pidginization, creolization, or language mixture existed between English and French in the Middle Ages, and it is our firm conviction that no such events occurred.
The 1977 C.J.Bailey and K.Marlodt's (creolists) "The French Lineage of English" has received considerable attention and is considered by some creolists a plausible scenario of England in the Middle Ages; the scenario has two main components.
First, sometime between 900 and 1066 a creole arose in the North as a result of contact between Old English and Viking Norse. It is not clear which is supposed to have been the base language.
B&M said:
Anglo-Saxon had already a clear tendency to reduce its inflections as the result of the Nordic creolization, and a number of analytic expressions had also come into existence as possible options.
The Nordic creolization of Anglo-Saxon caused inflections to be phonetologically reduced; their final loss can be attributed to the general creole tendency to simplify morphology.
Second, sometime between 1066 and 1200 English and French together produed a creole, which we know as Middle English...ME is claimed to be an obvious mixed language made up of Old English and Old French components. As for which language forms the framework into which the other language's materials were incorporated, B&M think it most likely that ME arose by incorporating English lexicon into Old French.
B&M said:
French creolization seems to have proceeded in two steps-- a major creolization before 1200, and a minor one mainly with Central French that involved massive borrowing during the 13th-14th c's...considering the possibility...that Middle English began with a heavy admixture of Anglo-Saxon elements into Old French.
Thomason & Kaufman (non-creolists) criticized B&M
Bailey believes creolization is happening all the time. To him 'creolization' means any kind of structural interference from another language. Any kind of 'analytic' development in a language is taken as evidence of foreign interference. But no language has escaped foreign influence. We don't think 'analytic' developments are necessary evidence of foreign interference nor should they be labeled 'creolization.' The available evidence puts ME squarely in the large group of normally transmitted languages, not in the smaller group of mixed languages that have no genetic affiliations.
Gradual simplification and regularization of linguistic subsystems are typical and normal. When vernacular English reappears ca. 1150 in the Midlands, ca. 1200 in the South, and ca. 1250 in the North, the well-known facts, given 900 as the last reliable point of reference, are
1. Southern has very little changed from OE
2. Midland shows some Norse-influence and moderate change
3. Norther shows a great deal of Norse-influence, change, and idiosyncracy though most is attributed to Old Northumbrian/Old East Mercian.
4. All show superficial French influence, stronger in the South.
This is the framework within which hypotheses about the linguistic habit of English speakers from 900 to 1200 must be formulated.
Concerning the influence of French on we add quotes from Middle English G.V.Smithers (non-creolist):
The fundmental changes in the inflexion of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns were under way before the Conquest, were the outcome of internal processes likely to operate in any language with a moderately ample system of 'inflexion.' Changes in the ending of verbs are the product of purely internal factors. The recudtion of OE diphthongs to their first element had set in before the Conquest... Thus the impact of an alien language spoken by a new ruling class did not substantially affect or modify the structure of English.
Vocabulary lying nearest the surface are the most easily touched by an alien tongue; it is the vocabulary of ME that has been affected by OF.
J.Milroy (creolist) (Trudgill ed. 1984:11) presents a scenario for the breakdown and reassembly of English structure under Norse and French influence reminiscent of B&M's:
Certain general principles that operate in language contact situations are now well known to socilingts and creolists.
1. gross morphological simplification
2. some loss of segmental phonological distinction
3. relexification (replacement of the lexicon of one language with those of another.)
4. preference for a fixed SVO word order.
ME shows clear signs that at least three, 1, 3, and 4,have operated.(Milroy 1983)
As for the French lexical influence on English in the ME period, French words expanded the total voabulary of English but did not displace native vocabulary which happened later. We deny 1) gross morphological simplification 3) Norse lexical influence on Norsified English as relexification."
(Sarah Grey Thomason & Terrence Kaufman,
Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics, California 1988: 306-315)
Bossel said:
Since I study English in Germany with mostly German lecturers, it's quite improbable that this is the case for me.
I am not saying that you in particular are influenced by the cultural bias. How could you possibly when there's no conflict of interest ? And even if.
But the non-creolist view might still have started (historically) among scholars with strong cultural bias and a narrow definition of creole (i.e. from observation of predetermined geographical area, not from an abstract, general, theoretic standpoint), and also can be blamed is the fact that creolization had never been thought of as a more wide spread process that 'might' have governed language interaction between two genetically related languages.
Given the lack of written language material during 900-1250 which leaves either side of the argument inconclusive compounded by the illogical inisistence of at least some linguists in demanding the overly strict definition of pidgin/creole that they be the product of two unrelated languages gives grounds to doubt the validity of the non-creolist argument.
Arguments given by non-creolists such as Thomason & Kaufman are not much stronger than Bailey et al.'s OE-Norse, OE-OF creolization model. Furthermore Thomason & Kaufman's criticism of the theory can also be applied to improve upon the present model.
One minor question: Do people tend to write less in times of a major power transition and social change compared to a more stable period in history ? Or is writing itself not affected, but just that the written records are not well-preserved due to the change ? Why aren't there much written records of English or other languages spoken in Britain from 900-1250 ?