Re: Rant on partial understandings (was: Spoken French, coins)

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.
-M

John Cowan wrote:
 Another fine example, from the days of King Canute,
> but devised by Tom Shippey (the Tolkien and Old English scholar)
>
> Consider what happens when somebody who speaks. . . Old English. . .
> runs into somebody. . . who speaks good Old Norse. They can no doubt
> communicate with each other, but complications in both languages are
> going to get lost. So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in
> good Old English) "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart," he says:
> "Ic selle the that hors the drageth minne waegn."
>
> Now the old Norseman -- if he had to say this -- would say: "Ek mun
> selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine."
>
> So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says "waegn" and
> the other says "vagn". One says "hors" and "draegeth"; the other says
> "hros" and "dregr", but broadly they are communicating. They understand
> the main words. What they don't understand are the grammatical parts of
> the sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for
> one horse "that hors" but for two horses he says "tha hors". Now the Old
> Norse speaker understands the word horse all right, but he's not sure if
> it means one or two because in Old English you say "one horse", "two
> horse". There is no difference between the two words for horse. The
> difference is conveyed in the word "the" and the old Norseman might not
> understand this because his word for "the" doesn't behave like that. So:
> are you trying to sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two
> horses? If you get enough situations like that there is a strong drive
> towards simplifying the language.

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