LL-L "Morphology" 2009.07.23 (01) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 23 July 2009 - Volume 01
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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Morphology

Folks,

Regarding morphological simplification in English and Scots, our Wesley
Parish shared with us his hypothesis in which already prior to the Norman
Conquest intensive contacts with Old Norse (apparently Old Danish in
Southern England and Old Norwegian north of there) led to morphological
simplification in the spoken language varieties, the cause being
discrepancies in stress patterns.

Wes, I find all this very astute and interesting and have been mulling it
over. However, it does not necessarily follow that my comments and questions
are particularly erudite. Please bear with me.

Naturally, trying to follow your train of thought and taking it from there,
I arrived at the issue of tone in Scandinavian. As you probably know, Modern
Norwegian (both official varieties plus Trøndersk), Jamtlandic, Swedish and
Elfdalian have two contrastive tones ("pitch accents"). (I am not sure about
Gutnish, Norn and Scanian, including the Scanian dialect of Bornholm.) This
manifests itself in a way that is quite different from "simple" stress
patterns in English, Scots, Dutch, etc. in that it sounds as though tones
are distributed over more than one syllable, at least the second tone,
a.k.a. "double tone". ("Unstressed" syllables following a tone take on
"minor" tones of certain heights, this resulting in what to others sounds
like contour tones distributed over two or more syllables.) In Danish, this
second tone appears to have developed into the *stød*, a creaky voice
feature similar to the Vietnamese *ngã* "tumbling" tone. In other words,
Danish, too, used to be tonal or descended from a variety that was tonal.
Southern Jutish varieties do not have the *stød*, probably have lost it on
account of contacts with Low Saxon.

Where I am going here is that contacts with Old Norse may well have involved
dealing with Scandinavian tone. Was Old Norse tonal? Nobody can be sure, but
there is the widely accepted hunch that tonality is indeed inherently
Scandinavian. Why else would such a feature be so widely spread? You may
then wonder why it is that Modern Faroese and Icelandic are not tonal. Here
I put it to you that this may well be due to contacts with speakers of
Celtic, possibly in later times also with speakers of early English and
Northumbrian/Scots. Both islands seem to have been first inhabited by
Celtic-speaking hermits followed by smaller Celtic-speaking Christian
communities. Also, it appears that Old Norse immigrants to the islands took
with them Celtic-speaking women from Scotland and Ireland. (Apparently, DNA
data have confirmed this Scandinavian-Celtic mixture at least in Iceland.)
As far as I know, tonal languages adopted by speakers of non-tonal languages
tend to undergo tonal simplification and eventually loss of tonality. You
can see this for instance in the northwestern parts of China where tonal
simplification and, farther west, tonality loss can be observed in Mandarin
dialects based on Altaic (Mongolic and Turkic) substrata. (Varieties spoken
by the Muslim Dungan [Hui] people retain at least three tones, which can be
argued to be due to their ancestry being overwhelmingly Chinese-speaking.)
Furthermore, Mandarin spoken as a second language by various Altaic- and
Indo-European-speaking ethnicities of Xinjiang tends to be tonally deficient
or devoid of tones. In other words, they apply "simple" stress patterns to
the tonal language.

So I wonder if something like this played a role during the time of
intensive Scandinavianization in Britain.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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