Popular article, "A New Kind of English"

[Laurence Horn]

At 3:48 PM -0500 8/15/04, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:
>There are (or at least there were) serious academic arguments about
>whether English went through pidgin or creole stages in its history.
>My sense, as a non-specialist, is that the case for pidginization is
>stronger for the contact with Old Norse than for the contact with
>French. In any event, pidgins don't result from any conscious
>decision to fuse languages, certainly not by the literary elite.
>
>The author of this piece is remarkably ill-informed. It seems like
>his primary source was _The Story of Engish_ which he apparently
>watched on video 10 years ago, probably with the sound muted.

Very muted.  I use the relevant chapter, "The Mother Tongue", from
_The Story of English_ videos in my SHEW (Structure and History of
English Words) class, and while it's not perfect it's not nearly this
dumb.  In fact, as you note above, McNeil does play up the Old
Norse/OE contact in the Midlands, but I don't think he uses the
P[idgin]-word, and he certainly doesn't treat the Anglo-Norman/French
influence in those terms.  Nor is there any claim about Chaucer
deciding "Why not invent a pidgin and see if it sells?"  In fact I
was just thinking of using the passage Mark called to our
attention--especially the second paragraph about pidgins and
Chaucer--as a "What's Wrong With This Paragraph?" exercise for the
SHEW class, after we've watched and discussed the "Mother Tongue"
video.

larry

>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Patti J. Kurtz
>Sent: Sun 8/15/2004 3:23 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject:      Re: Popular article, "A New Kind of English"
>
>Stop me if I'm wrong, but I thought a pidgin was a linguistically
>simplified blending of two languages usually used in trade-- and that
>once a pidgin was learned as a first language and became more complex in
>structure, it was a Creole.
>
>English is a pidgin?  Sure, it's undergone changes over the centuries,
>but all languages change.  Just because speakers borrow from other
>languages, to me, that doesn't make them "pidgins." Borrowing to me is
>different from the combining which happens when a pidgin is created. Or
>am I completely off base here?
>
>Chaucer and other storytellers "decided" to fuse French and English?
>(all by themselves?) I don't buy that either.  Wasn't the French
>influence more because of the Norman Conquest-- so English speakers
>"borrowed" Latinate French words into the language because it was the
>language of government and state?  My understanding is that Chaucer
>simply was one of the first to write in the language used by everyday
>speakers and not that used by educated scholars.
>
>That article seems way off base to me-- (or is it me?)
>
>Patti Kurtz
>English Department
>Minot State University
>
>
>mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU wrote:
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>Poster:       "Mark A. Mandel" <mamandel at LDC.UPENN.EDU>
>>Subject:      Popular article, "A New Kind of English"
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>I feel rather dubious about some of the definitions and examples of
>>"dialect" in this article, of which I have reproduced only the first three
>  >paragraphs here. Comments, anyone?
>>