McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_

[Neal Whitman]

Hi Amy,

I didn't think you were shooting your mouth off; I thought you had some good
points that I wasn't aware of that people who read my review should think
about. If it's OK, I'd like to put your second message in the comments, too.
If not, that's all right, and in fact, I can even take your first one out of
the comments if you want.

Best,
Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Amy West" <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 4:58 PM
Subject: McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_ Re: meaningless-do
from Welsh and medieval English military history


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
> Subject:      McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_ Re:
> meaningless-do
>              from Welsh and medieval English military history
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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