McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_

[Neal Whitman]

Sorry -- didn't mean to send that last message to the whole list.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Neal Whitman" <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 10:19 PM
Subject: Re: McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_


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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject:      Re: McWhorter's _Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue_
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>
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>> 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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