Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Steve Gustafson]

Jim Rader wrote:

> Maybe peripheral to the topic, but I think Larry's concept of the
> length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated.
> The literate classes of medieval England had at least a good
> working knowledge of Anglo-French well after 1250, judging by its
> use in commerical transactions and Parliamentary and court
> records.  Far more prose writing in Anglo-French survives from the
> period after 1250 than from before.  Later Anglo-French tends to be
> devalued because of its increasing semantic, morphological, and
> phonological departure from francien, i.e., Parisian French, but this
> is just traditional linguistic purism--Anglo-French was a valid dialect
> of medieval French well into the 15th century, and for lawyers its
> use in reports and professional notes continued into the 17th
> century.  For a corrective view, see some of the articles by William
> Rothwell, e.g., "The Legacy of Anglo-French: <faux amis> in
> French and English," _Zeitschrift f|r Romanische Philologie_, Bd.
> 109 (1993) and "The Missing Link in English Etymology: Anglo-
> French," _Medium Aevum_, v. 60 (1991).

The French used by lawyers was increasingly a jargon applied by rote,
and I suspect without real understanding of French.  It lost grammatical
gender early on.  The formulaic parts of pleadings are set forth in what
is standard for the language, since most of them are copied from earlier
books; but when new ideas are required, their vocabulary fails them, so
you get phrases like "li ject un brickbat a le dit justice." [an actual
example]

Peculiarly, the scriveners were better etymologists than spellers.  They
routinely wrote the first person plural verb forms with the curlicue
that is the standard Latin abbreviation for -mus.  We don't really know
how the lawyers said these verbs; and latterday editions of the Year
Books and similar texts routinely print "parlomus" and so forth.

English was not routinely used in statutes until the early Tudors;
statutes were drafted in this French, or in Latin.  Pleading in this
sort of French was permitted in court until it was abolished by Charles
II at the Restoration.

--
  Quae vestimenta
       induet misella
            in conviviis crastinis?