LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.14 (05) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 14 October 2009 - Volume 01
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 From: DAVID COWLEY <DavidCowley at anglesey.gov.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.13 (04) [EN]

As I recall from somewhere, Brythonic did have case endings, but these
are thought to have been lost somewhere around and just after the Romans
left Britain. Whilst possible British-Celtic influence on early English
seems a touchy subject to some, I think it very likely that there were
such influences, but these tended to be at the lower ends of the class
setup and thus weren't likely to show up in writing, where the key
players often had elite backgrounds. Whilst the breakdown of inflections
in Old English seems to have been swifter in the North than in the South
(as seen for example, in glosses from 900s NE England) and this may very
well have been influenced by some kind of English/ Danish creolisation,
there may also have been an earlier layer of British (Celtic) influence
which had been there for longer - that early loss of case-endings from
British may indeed have led to simpler English in some places early on.
As a tiny hint of evidence, Bede in the early 700s wrote about a
Northumbrian nobleman caught in a battle, who tried to make out he was a
low status prisoner, but whose speech gave him away as being high-class.
I personally suspect that the poetry used in high-status settings (such
as Beowulf) would  have been something that the lowest-born folk would
not fully understand. The loss of the English elite in and after 1066
may have helped open up the way for the more 'common' forms of English
to have more influence, because the elite-based Wessex version which was
the 'official' English at the time came to be used less and less
thereafter, whist regional forms came to the fore, and case-endings lost
ground quite fast. (One could speculate that had the Wessex form kept
its official role, case endings might have stabilised at some point
before being almost fully lost.)
Going a little further on British survivals, there's a very interesting
article on Cumbric on Wikipaedia, which shows the kind of tantalising
evidence there is for the survival of this form of British Celtic in N
England and S Scotland, almost certainly into the 1200s.
David Cowley

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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.13 (04) [EN]

Hi Mark and everybody,

Mark Brooks wrote:

 Have no fear, I’ll bring this around to the lowlands.  Okay, let’s take
English for example.  I presume that it had contact with the Celtic
languages already present in what we now call Britain.  Did the Celtic
languages at the time have a system of noun declensions?  I ask, because Old
English did, I believe.  If they both did, then we would expect them to
influence each other, and possibly retain the case system, right?


If you accept standard history i.e. Anglo-Saxon invasion in the mid 5th
century, then according K.H. Jackson 'Language and History in Early
Britain', the Brittonic dialects were losing case endings and were
developing into the historic forms which we know. Early Welsh was
differentiated by the sixth century, when Old English had five cases. The
traditional view is that the the Anglo-Saxons wiped the Celts out where they
settled, and there was minimal influence from Celtic on English.


Now, I realize that English has a more complicated history than that.  It
had significant contact with Old Norse or Danish which no doubt influenced
it.  In fact, I had a professor who believed that English went thru a
process of creolization with Danish that stripped off much of the case
system and gender system.  Then, he felt that the Norman conquest put it
thru another similar process.
 Do y’all have any ideas on that?


The earliest documents which show extensive and systematic confusion over
case endings in Old English are the glosses to the Lindisfarne and Rushworth
gospels, which are in the Northumbrian dialect, which looks like supporting
the theory of Danish influence. The contact between the two languages was so
close that English adopted words such as 'they, their, them' from Norse,
words that are very rarely borrowed. On the other hand, the Norse language
in Norway and Denmark underwent the same general evolution vis-a-vis case
marking as English did, and that without any significant language contact.
Very early Northumbrian documents show the loss of final -n in inflections,
which seems indicative of a weakening of inflectional endings already at a
stage before the Norse settlements. It may also be the case that
Northumbrian documents reflect English developments first because the
orthographic traditions were interrupted earliest in the Danelaw area, and
that the same developments may have been occurring in some areas outside the
Norse settlement areas. Even after the Norman conquest, and the cessation of
English writing, some early Middle English dialects retained some of the
case system, such as dative sing -e.
Paul Tatum

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Folks,

Maybe we should not assume that the system of a language is simplified
because a language with which it is in contact is "simpler." Perhaps we
should look at the possibility of *any* significant language contact having
at least the potential of leading to simplification.

Think of the "baby talk" people resort to when they try to make themselves
understood to people that do not understand their language or understand it
poorly! This tends to be quite apart from the complexities of both speakers'
languages.

Both Old Danish and Old Norman French have complex morphologies, as does Old
English. Yet, English underwent significant morphological simplification,
supposedly due to intensive contacts with speakers of those languages.

Let's look at the other Lowlands languages! Frisian, Low Frankish and Low
Saxon, too, underwent significant morphological simplification. What might
have provoked that? And, outside the Lowlands, the same thing happened to
Scandinavian varieties. Same question. Or is this due to intensive
absorption of Sami speakers? German morphology, on the other hand, is far
less simplified, although we know that in the south and west of it there
were more or less contacts with Celtic and Romance varieties.

So maybe something more than language contacts is at play here.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

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