creole

[Salikoko Mufwene]

Now, this is information that no serious student of the history of English can
afford to ignore!

Sali.

At 04:13 PM 2/26/2001 -0500, Herb Stahlke wrote:
>It might be worth noting here that the history of English does not
>permit a direct line of descent from the West Saxon of Alfred and
>the Anglo-Saxon kings down through Middle English to Modern
>English.  The centers of power were already switching to the east
>when the Normans arrived.  West Saxon was still the literary
>language, but Mercian, the dialect of the London-Oxford-Cambridge
>area was growing in importance.  Mercian and West Saxon had been
>diverging, by the time of the Normans, for better than half a
>millennium, and an early Middle English text like the mid-12th c.
>Peterborough Chronicle already shows much of the loss of
>inflection that characterizes ME.  What happened after the Normans
>was a rapid cessation of West Saxon writing and a near total
>cessation of English writing.  The writing that appears a century
>and more after the Normans reflects some French influence but much
>more the rise of Mercian.  The rapid demise of Norman French in
>England and the rise in influence of the London area resulted in a
>fairly abrupt shift in power from one English dialect to another
>rather than a creolization of Old English into Middle English.
>
>Herb Stahlke
>

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Salikoko S. Mufwene                        s-mufwene at uchicago.edu
University of Chicago                      773-702-8531; FAX 773-834-0924
Department of Linguistics
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/humanities/linguistics/faculty/mufwene.html
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