Normanization of England

[David L. White]

> At 11:08 PM 4/29/01 -0400, JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>> Even when people 'convert' to a new language, they have to learn it from
>> _somebody_; ie., native speakers.  Furthermore, there are more and less
>> likely was for this to happen; in a premodern context, small intrusive
>> minorities generally get absorbed by their linguistic surroundings rather
>> than vice versa, even if they're politically dominant. (Which is why this
>> conversation is not being conducted in Norman French.)  Learning a new
>> language is difficult for adults, and is seldom undertaken without very
>> strong motivation.

> True - though it does happen.  In fact the very French you mention is the
> result of one such occurrence.  A small minority of Romans managed to
> convert a much larger number of Gauls into speaking Latin.

> I wonder if part of the difference wasn't time.  The Norman French
> incursion into England was essentially a single pulse, after which there
> was little additional immigration - indeed the French crown quickly forced
> the Norman nobles in England to renounce their French lands, effectively
> separating the two groups.

        The situation with Norman, and the failure of Normanization in
England, is indeed a little more complex than mere numbers.  The
extraordinary successes of Philip Augustus not only cut off the English
Normans from their French lands but created feelings of rivalry between the
two groups, such as were later evidenced in the Hundred Years War.  If it
had been King John that was an extraordinary success, and Philip Augustus
who was an incompetent idiot, matters might have developed differently.
        But probably not, for another factor here is that the Normans took
themselves very seriously as kings of England, as opposed to overlords of
some wet green land, and never contemplated extirpating English
institutions, of which language was one.  Thus when it came time for
England, in the eyes of Henry II, to have a better legal code, English law
was used as the basis, though importing Norman law would have been possible.
I think if we could go back and ask them, they would express surprise at
those who express surprise that Norman did not become the language of
England.   Such a development was never contemplated.
        Digressing a bit, in the case of Mednyj Aleut it seems that about 30
Russians among about 300 Aleuts were enough to wholly transform the the
native language.  Actually, I dispute this interpretation, but what did not
happen was that the Russians were linguisticaly absorbed into the Aleuts.
Part of the reason for what happened seems to have been that Aleut verbal
morphology, being unusually complex, was unusually diffiucult for the
Russians to learn, so even such a nebulous concept as language difficulty
can be a factor in such situations.

Dr. David L. White