Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Jim Rader]

I'm not disputing your point about Basque--obviously, the
sociolinguistic pressures of Romance on Basque are not
comparable to the French/English relationship.  But one might
draw the conclusion from your post that the period during which
Anglo-French served as a source for English loans lasted two
centuries, when in reality it was at least twice as long, and many
loans and calques took place in the two centuries that Anglo-
French was "dying out."  Its gradual extinction as a first language
of the elite did not end its role as a vital auxiliary language, on a
par with Latin, in English society.

Jim Rader

> Jim Rader writes:

>> Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the
>> length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated.
>> The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good
>> working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its
>> use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court
>> records.  Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the
>> period after 1250 than from before.  Later Anglo-French tends to be
>> devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and
>> phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this
>> is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect
>> of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its
>> use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th
>> century.  For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William
>> Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: <faux amis> in
>> French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd.
>> 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-
>> French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991).
>
> Yes, of course.  But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman
> French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue --
> after a couple of centuries.  The later administrative Anglo-French was
> nobody's mother tongue.  This is in great contrast to the position
> in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not
> only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority
> of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as
> well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were
> incorporated from the 10th century on.
>
> My point was this.  The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers
> for a couple of centuries.  The Basques have been an island in a sea
> of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the
> western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been
> incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years.
> In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans
> in the language is in no way surprising.
>
> Larry Trask