Renfrew's Celtic Scenario

[Gordon Selway]

At 12:34 am -0500 29/2/00, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:
>>petegray at btinternet.com writes:
>>English of a slightly earlier time (still intelligible today) shows good
>>similarities in person endings, eg: >>Thou hast, thou makest;  she hath,
>>she maketh
>>du hast,  du machst,   sie hat,  sie macht

>-- But the English of today -- and of the past few centuries -- uses much
>simpler forms:  You have, you >make, she has, she makes.  There's been a
>radical loss of inflection (not to mention the loss of >grammatical
>gender, the declension of the noun, the role of word order in forming
>sentences, etc.)

Some Englishes do retain certain of the earlier features.  The great sound
shift has not had universal effect, there is (or was) the relict of
14th/15th century English, called Yola, in Co Wexford, and some other
features remain (or did until the 1870 Education Act took its toll) in
local dialects.  Of course, these are not the high prestige forms which
presumably endure where the governmental system supports them and does not
collapse, so that they are disseminated widely within the population.

But 'thou' (as a workaday pronoun, rather than in fixed formulas) - in some
cases with the conjugated verb form - does survive.  I wonder whether the
use of the authorised version of the bible may have affected this, though I
would not expect a low status child saying 'thou hast' to be well received
in an educational system which elsewhere made use of the 'Welsh not' (a
kind of wooden thing to be placed on the neck of the latest child to speak
Welsh instead of English).  And an otherwise useful collection of
Worcestershire dialect forms by a Mrs Jessie Chamberlain (about whom I know
nothing beyond her name and what can be gleaned from her book) decries the
lower orders' pronunciation of 'Tenbury Wells' as 'Tembury Wells', ignoring
the strong likelihood that almost everyone would assimilate the 'n' to the
following 'b'.

>By way of contrast, early Greek and Sanskrit share many retained PIE
>features -- the present, aorist and perfect, for instance.

Yes, but the functions of the aorist and perfect were different in each
language.

Gordon Selway
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>