(off-list) Re: Creole languages (was Who is Eddy Peters?)

[Mark Odegard]

>From: "D. Ezra Johnson" <ezra_50 at HOTMAIL.COM>

>Maybe other linguists have found the idea more attractive. The gist of the
>argument is simply that the conditions necessary for creole formation were
>not even close to being met in the Middle English period.

Creoles are almost 'new' languages, as with Hatian Creole, or Tok Pisin,
relying on a donor language mainly for vocabulary. This certainly was not
the case when English was overrun by Norman French. Rather, the result was
our immense French superstratum.

English did go through a very major restructuring, however. Mostly, there
was no 'central' or 'elite' dialect of English to retard innovation. Old
English did not survive as a language of high culture. If it had, Middle
English and early Modern English would have likely been different, more
Dutch-like than it is.

The actual emergence of English, in the North of England, where Anglo-Saxon
dialects met Norse dialects might be called 'creoloid', but even here, this
is the wrong word. The Icelandic sagas tell us these people 'understood'
each other (more or less). The result was a convergent dialect where some
North Germanic features (mostly lexical) were added to a mainly West
Germanic structure.


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