Celtic influence

[iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

On Fri, 19 Mar 1999 JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>Iiffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:

>>The situation in England of that time is a little anomalous,

>-- normal.

	No.  The general rule, as some others have noted, is that where
there are classes, there are class dialects.

>>for a time everyone spoke his local dialect

>-- as virtually everyone in Europe did prior to the emergence of the modern
>State and standardized languages in post-Renaissance times.

	No.

>Check out Martin Luther's choice of language for his German bible.  There was
>nothing _but_ regional dialects until then.  Unless you count the language of
>the German equivalent of troubadors, which nobody used but them.

	Regional _class_ dialects.  I grow weary of this.

>>Thus the class barriers in English at that time were relatively recent, and
>>there had not been much time for much divergence to occur.

>-- nice try but it won't work.

	Yes it will.  The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till
shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before.  Thus, just as in
England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve.

>Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by
>the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the
>late 17th century.

>Substantial class differences in accent are a rare phenomenon, and vanishingly
>rare in preliterate societies.

	Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to
sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to
appreciate.  Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom
Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a
regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower
class dialect.  The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is
appreciably different.

>Remember, an Anglo-Saxon landowner's main social contacts would be with his
>social inferiors, not his peers.  Everything from his nursmaid to his groom.
>Those are the people he'd spend most time talking to.

>Note the similarities of black and white English in the antebellum Southern
>plantation belt -- every traveller noted how the planters and their families
>"talked like Negroes".

>That was because they spent most of their time talking _to_ Negroes.

	So your theory then enables us to confidently (or should I say
immodestly) predict that Southern aristocrats speak Black English.  As
someone once recently said:

		1) Nice try but it won't work
		2) QED

	The travellers in question must not have been from that region,
and must have been mistaking the shared similaritiies of Southern American
English and Black English (which is of course a Southern dialect) as
identity.
	But rather than engage in this all too good imitation of a Monty
Python skit (argument, or is that just contradiction), let us return to
the Bickerton challenge.  If you've got something that explains 1)
why ME diverges from the rest of Germanic and converges with Celtic, and
2) why the geographical pattern of innovations is as it is, let's hear it.
If not .. [use your imagination].

					DLW