McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_ Re: meaningless-do from Welsh and medieval English military history

[Amy West]

Thanks very much. I need to educate myself about
this debate before I shoot my mouth off. I also
realize this isn't a HEL list. . . .

My problem with the "it was in the spoken
language long before it was in the written
language" part of the argument is that in Old
Norse we see a similar situation on the Isle of
Man, and the Manx runic inscriptions show mixing
of the Celtic and Norse languages within a short
time period of the Norse settlement. I also have
a problem with his "there was a 150 year gap in
the writing of English" -- we have stuff that is
late OE and early ME. It's not a gap: it's a dip,
but not a gap.

I also read the chapter on the argument for
contact with Old Norse leading to the levelling
of the OE inflectional system. I have trouble
with the argument that he presents because a) it
looks to me like that levelling starts before
contact with ON b) he tries to stretch out the ON
contact period by going back to the early raids
in the late 700s, but contact isn't significant
until the settlement of the Danelaw mid-to late
800s c) he doesn't recognize that the
conservatism of Modern Icelandic is due to a
conscious reform of the orthography, morphology,
and syntax in the 1600s/1700s.  And it just seems
counter-intuitive to me that an inflected
language would influence another one to lose
inflections, especially when the two cousin
languages are somewhat mutually intelligible (to
a limited degree). Finally, he assumes that the
Norse Orm Gamalson in the sundial inscription is
the one composing/writing the OE inscription,
when that is not necessarily the case. Ottar's
report on Norway being preserved in the OE
Orosius is another instance where we're not sure
if Ottar reported the stuff in Norse and it was
translated by the OE scribe, or if Ottar knew OE.

---Amy West

>Date:    Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:39:56 -0500
>From:    Geoff Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>
>Subject: Re: meaningless-do from Welsh and medieval English military history
>
>I will not get into the historical debates on
>this, but can recommend an interesting take that
>our local syntax/semantics reading group
>wrestled our way through this week.  It's not
>well-written but has an interesting
>semantics-based argument for indigenous
>development:
>
>DEBRA ZIEGELER (2004) Reanalysis in the history
>of do: A view from construction grammar
>Cognitive Linguistics 15’Äì3, 529’Äì574

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