<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">===========================================<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 14 October 2009 - Volume 01<br></font><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#999999"><a href="mailto:lowlands@lowlands-l.net">lowlands@lowlands-l.net</a> - <a href="http://lowlands-l.net/">http://lowlands-l.net/</a><br>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">From: DAVID COWLEY <</font><a href="mailto:DavidCowley@anglesey.gov.uk"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">DavidCowley@anglesey.gov.uk</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.13 (04) [EN]</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Â </font></div></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">As I recall from somewhere, Brythonic did have case endings, but these<br>are thought to have been lost somewhere around and just after the Romans<br>left Britain. Whilst possible British-Celtic influence on early English<br>
seems a touchy subject to some, I think it very likely that there were<br>such influences, but these tended to be at the lower ends of the class<br>setup and thus weren't likely to show up in writing, where the key<br>
players often had elite backgrounds. Whilst the breakdown of inflections<br>in Old English seems to have been swifter in the North than in the South<br>(as seen for example, in glosses from 900s NE England) and this may very<br>
well have been influenced by some kind of English/ Danish creolisation,<br>there may also have been an earlier layer of British (Celtic) influence<br>which had been there for longer - that early loss of case-endings from<br>
British may indeed have led to simpler English in some places early on.<br>As a tiny hint of evidence, Bede in the early 700s wrote about a<br>Northumbrian nobleman caught in a battle, who tried to make out he was a<br>low status prisoner, but whose speech gave him away as being high-class.<br>
I personally suspect that the poetry used in high-status settings (such<br>as Beowulf) would have been something that the lowest-born folk would<br>not fully understand. The loss of the English elite in and after 1066<br>
may have helped open up the way for the more 'common' forms of English<br>to have more influence, because the elite-based Wessex version which was<br>the 'official' English at the time came to be used less and less<br>
thereafter, whist regional forms came to the fore, and case-endings lost<br>ground quite fast. (One could speculate that had the Wessex form kept<br>its official role, case endings might have stabilised at some point<br>
before being almost fully lost.)<br>
Going a little further on British survivals, there's a very interesting<br>article on Cumbric on Wikipaedia, which shows the kind of tantalising<br>evidence there is for the survival of this form of British Celtic in N<br>
England and S Scotland, almost certainly into the 1200s.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">David Cowley</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">----------</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">From: Paul Tatum <</font><a href="mailto:ptatum@blueyonder.co.uk"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">ptatum@blueyonder.co.uk</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2009.10.13 (04) [EN]</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Hi Mark and everybody,</font></div>
<div><br><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Mark Brooks wrote:</font></div>
<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
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<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">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?</font></div>
</div></blockquote>
<div><br><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" color="#000099"> Do y’all have any ideas on that?</font></div></blockquote>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Â Â </font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Paul Tatum</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">----------<br><br>From: R. F. Hahn <</font><a href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">sassisch@yahoo.com</font></a><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">><br>
Subject: Language varieties</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Folks,</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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 <strong>any</strong> significant language contact having at least the potential of leading to simplification.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">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.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">So maybe something more than language contacts is at play here.</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></font>Â </div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Regards,<br>Reinhard/Ron</font></div>
<div><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Seattle, USA</font></div>
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