More on English as creole-like, French-influenced language (fwd)

[David Robertson]

...Sally, by all means, keep 'em coming; I'm glad you've got a few free
moments from the Linguistic Institute!  -- Dave

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 10:00:34 -0400
From: Sally Thomason <thomason at umich.edu>
Subject: Re: Race and ChInUk Wawa (fwd)


Henry and all,

  One of the most interesting points about some of those changes in English, like
the loss of the case endings, is that they did NOT start in the regions of French
contact, and in fact some were well under way before the Norman Conquest of 1066.
They also, as I recall (this I'd have to double-check to make sure), did not happen
at the right time or place to be attributed to any Norse influence.  So there is no
coincidence, suspicious or otherwise; the timing & location of the changes both rule
out foreign influence as a factor.  At the most, French influence could have speeded
up the process a bit, in the later stages.  There are no major structural changes
in English whose origin can be reasonably attributed to French influence.  (I do
realize that asking anyone to take this assertion on faith is a bit much!  Terry
Kaufman presents all the details of the argument, with evidence, in his 100-page case
study of English in the 1988 book he & I co-authored, Language Contact, Creolization,
and Genetic Linguistics.  Trust me, you wouldn't want me to go into all of that here
...but the book should be findable in a university library.)

   As Henry says, English does have a number of structural features that one
can also find in many (not all) pidgins and creoles.  So do a great many other
languages around the world, though, so -- as I think most creolists would now
agree -- identifying, or defining, creoles by means of a "laundry list" of typical
features is not a promising approach to the vexing problem of pidgin/creole
characterization: too many differences among pidgins & creoles, too many other
languages around the world that have similar packages of features.  (I am not
suggesting that Henry was advocating such an approach!  I mention it here only
because his comments about English have been used elsewhere by people who do
advocate this approach, so it seemed worth mentioning the approach here.)

   Well, I guess I do disagree with Henry on one point: I think that if you're
looking for a Germanic language that has undergone significant
influence from non-Germanic language(s), English can't hold a candle to Yiddish
(Slavic structural influence, Hebrew lexical influence) or Afrikaans, which
some creolists (not including me) still believe is a creole.


   -- Sally

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