Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Larry Trask]

Jim Rader writes:

>  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  length of time Anglo-French influenced English is rather outdated.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).

Yes, of course.  But, in my posting, I was careful to say that Norman
French died out as a *spoken language* -- that is, as a mother tongue --
after a couple of centuries.  The later administrative Anglo-French was
nobody's mother tongue.  This is in great contrast to the position
in the Basque Country, in which Latin and Romance continued to be not
only living languages but also the languages of the vast majority
of the people in the whole area surrounding the Basque Country, as
well as the languages of the states within which the Basques were
incorporated from the 10th century on.

My point was this.  The English were ruled by a handful of French-speakers
for a couple of centuries.  The Basques have been an island in a sea
of Latino-Romance speech for around 2000 years, they were part of the
western Roman Empire as long as that empire lasted, and they have been
incorporated into Romance-speaking states for around 1000 years.
In the circumstances, then, the enormous number of Latino-Romance loans
in the language is in no way surprising.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk

Tel: 01273-678693 (from UK); +44-1273-678693 (from abroad)
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