THEORY: English as a creole [was Re: Rant on partial understandings]

Quoting Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...>:

[Theory proposed:  English loses the dual because Anglosaxons
needed to communicate effectively with invading Norsemen.]

> I've heard that this is the reason that modern English has no cases:
> the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse ivaders eventually settled on a lowest
> common denominator language that became English as we know it.  So
> English is essential a creole and was even before 1066.  I've heard.
If only it were that simple.  The problem is that English bears no
other resemblances to a creole or pidgin.  Typically, creoles start
out life as pidgins, which themselves almost always eliminate all
inflectional morphology and greatly simplify the phonology.  Creoles
develop when children grow up speaking the pidgin, and in doing so
typically imbue into the new creole all sorts of complexities that
did not exist in the pidgin (a consistent syllable structure;
a consistent phoneme inventory; various kinds of grammaticalized
aspectual distinctions).  So, a creole does look like a lot of
regular languages, but it typically does not look anything like the
lexifier language of the pidgin.  English, in distinction from
creoles and pidgins not only has maintained many grammatical oddities
straight from its IE heritage (e.g. three roots for the verb to be;
the Germanic dental past tense suffix), it also has a phonology vastly
different from most creoles and pidgins.  Almost no creole or pidigin,
e.g., allows a complex onset with three consonants, and most creoles or
pidgins do not have typologically marked phones like [T] or [D].

It is clear that English has undergone radical simplification
from the times when it first separated from languages on the
continent, but in most cases these can all be attributed to
internal shifts.  The case system of Old English, in particular,
could be wildly different from one declension to another. Because
the endings had no predictable semantic basis, it's reasonable
to think that speakers saw no need to keep them when phonological
changes threatened to obliterate the distinctions anyways.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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