Re: Bigbabytalk -a primitive language for AI

On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Nik wrote:

> AcadonBot wrote:
> > I don't think the specialists consider that English was ever a pidgin.
>
> Indeed not.
Actually, an English-Norse pidgin has been proposed, but virtually nobody
accepts it.  The guy who proposed it (can't recall any details) pointed
out an inscription on a church which was neither completely English, nor
comletely Norse, but had a mixture of the two.  That isn't enough evidence
to show that such usage occurred outside that one village though.

  In fact, French had little grammatical influence on
> English.  Old Norse, now, did have a fairly significant influence, such
> as the usage of the verbal -s, and the 3rd person plural pronouns!  I've
> also read of a theory that the Old Norse influence was responsible for
> the loss of V2 order, but I can't remember the reasoning.
The Old Norse influence has also been credited with the erosion of case
and reduction of verbal agreement.  The theory goes that the stems were
fairly transparent in most cases, but the inflections were different, so
people neglected to inflect when speaking to people of the other language.

Marcus