creole

[Herb Stahlke]

It might be worth noting here that the history of English does not
permit a direct line of descent from the West Saxon of Alfred and
the Anglo-Saxon kings down through Middle English to Modern
English.  The centers of power were already switching to the east
when the Normans arrived.  West Saxon was still the literary
language, but Mercian, the dialect of the London-Oxford-Cambridge
area was growing in importance.  Mercian and West Saxon had been
diverging, by the time of the Normans, for better than half a
millennium, and an early Middle English text like the mid-12th c.
Peterborough Chronicle already shows much of the loss of
inflection that characterizes ME.  What happened after the Normans
was a rapid cessation of West Saxon writing and a near total
cessation of English writing.  The writing that appears a century
and more after the Normans reflects some French influence but much
more the rise of Mercian.  The rapid demise of Norman French in
England and the rise in influence of the London area resulted in a
fairly abrupt shift in power from one English dialect to another
rather than a creolization of Old English into Middle English.

Herb Stahlke

>>> dumasb at UTK.EDU 02/26/01 07:24AM >>>
Thanks for all the refs re English and creolization. I shall
read
these. Right now, it seems to me that we are using the terms
creole and
creolization in at least three ways.

Some definitions of creole depend on the history of the language;
the
Brittanica suggests that a present creole must have begun as a
pidgin, and that is what I was taught in graduate scdhool.

Other definitions apparently depend upon rates of change in the
language
at certain past times. For creolization to have occurred, there
must have
been a rate of change markedly greater than at other times.

Still others seem to depend upon the extent to which a wholesale
replacement has taken place.

So -- if we do not want to talk about the influence of French on
English
as a creolization process, do we have a terms for the kind of
major impact
on a language that French seems to have had on English? Or do we
just talk
about language contact? And degress of it?

Bethany