Race and ChInUk Wawa (fwd)

[Henry Kammler]

> 5.  I don't know of any evidence that English was significantly influenced at all by a Celtic
> substratum.  And French (not to mention Latin) influence, though significant, was quite
> limited -- I know that seems an odd claim, given all those words from French (and Latin), but
> they aren't mainly basic vocabulary words -- the basic vocabulary of English is overwhelmingly
> inherited from Proto-West-Germanic.  About 7% comes from other languages, specifically French
> and Norse.  (Outside the basic vocabulary, the percentage leaps up much higher, but that's a
> different, and far more superficial, kind of borrowing.)  Moreover, the structure of modern
> English is still Germanic.  The number of French-origin features outside the non-basic
> vocabulary is surprisingly limited: the phoneme "zh" (as in "pleasure") is partly of French
> origin, for instance (and it is the rarest phoneme in English).   There are also a few
> grammatical features, but again, not very many.  By contrast, if you compare English grammar
> with German grammar, you find very deep and close correspondences in such things as the
> so-called strong verbs (sing, sang, sung vs. German sing-en, sang, ge-sung-en).  Etc.  Lots of
> differences, too, of course; not surprising, with 1500-2000 years of divergence.  (English also
> borrowed vocabulary from Norse after the Viking invasions, and there are grammatical changes in
> the east & north of England that indicate influence from Norse.  But again it wasn't a huge
> amount of influence, though maybe more than French *structural* influence.)  Sorry to be so
> long-winded!  I realize English isn't the topic of this list, but someone brought it up, and...

As English is one of the major source languages of *modern* CJ it is
not totally off-topic, I think.
To make this clear: in no way do I maintain that English is, was or
will ever be a creole language. In the context of explaining
structural features that creolists consider typical for contact
languages one can still mention that in a very familiar language,
English that is, we find analogous processes. I don't know what the
loss of case-marking (except genitive -'s)[results in strict word
order], loss of personal endings in verbs (except 3rd person -s), loss
of gender  etc. were triggered by but the surface result is
comparable. Languages of course have their internal dynamics (and
English speakers should be happy not to have to fiddle around with
this very irregular West-Germanic case marking system anymore).  And
"loss" does not imply "poor"! If languages loose certain features they
develop new devices to convey the same meaning by different means,
that's all. Maybe it's a mere coincidence that modern English at the
same time was much more influenced by non-Germanic languages than any
other single language in that group. Maybe these things don't have
anything to do with each other...
I think *basic vocabulary* is a matter of definition as well as the
regional standard variety of English we decide to look at. But maybe
this goes too far, I agree.

Hope I didn't bore anybody.
Cheers,
Henry