Talk:Middle English creole hypothesis

Untitled

This article could use a better title, and it reads far too much like an essay. Therefore, I have marked it as needing cleanup. - Furrykef 10:09, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Agree with you that the title stinks. I will have a look at the contents when time permits and see what can be done with what is actually a promising start at a particularly difficult area. Sjc 10:15, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Original Research?

I suspect this article might be based on original research. A Google test only turned up a school paper in a cheating database. That and the personal-essay tone lead me to suspect OR. If we don't find any evidence to the contrary in a couple of days, this article might be a good candidate for a VfD. Szyslak 08:55, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A clarification: This article doesn't seem to be based on the school paper I found. Szyslak 09:05, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I did some more Google testing and found that there is a "creole hypothesis" that attempts to describe the shift from Old English to Middle English, which means this isn't original research after all. I found the term "creole hypothesis" all over the place, which gave me the idea for this page's new title (the last one was one of the worst titles in the history of Wikipedia). Szyslak 22:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't think this article is original research. While there is not much published on the topic it is a lively subject among specialists - people are talking about it. Graemedavis 21:46, 30 August 2007 (UTC) Follow-up - I'm told this idea was around in the 1970s, but did not gain general acceptance. It is now being looked at again. Critics point out that it is possible to have a mixed language which is not a Creole, and that a less contentious approach would be to speak of a Middel English as a mixed language (which may or may not be a creole). I agree with writer above that this area is surprisingly difficult to reference and that google doesn't seem to turn up much, but nonetheless it is an established idea. Graemedavis 22:33, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

kalabaw si karl marx bacolor hahaha...

Disappearance of Thou

The use of thou is still a feature of English dialect usage, eg Yorkshire. It is also portrayed as being used by some American religious communities, such as Quakers, or Amish. 193.32.176.177 12:38, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Thou in the article

I don't see the how the french parallel of this caused the dropping of thou. Thou was used well into the Early Modern English early (come on, we've all read Shakespeare) and in the Middle English era it was alive and well. I don't think tu was the reason for the dropping of thou. --Blackkdark (talk) 13:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Disappearance of Thou in English and of Du in Dutch

Note that also in modern Dutch the old du (thou) was replaced by jij / je (you). Dutch has formed a new plural jullie (from je lieden, meaning you people). On the other hand, German still uses du for the singular, and ihr for the plural.

So, maybe this dropping of thou / du in favour of the plural polite form is a West European phenomenon?

Giorb (talk) 14:12, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Du is still used in Frisian, which is surrounded by Dutch and Low Saxon dialects using je. And thou has survived, at least until recently, in many English dialects and of course in archaic-formal English. To the contrary, Low Franconian (except Limburgish) has lost du completely and did so at an early stage. So, I would consider it unrelated developments. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.169.49.216 (talk) 20:26, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Removed the section on Subject-Verb Inversion in Yes-No Questions

I'm a graduating Linguistics major and this article is an atrocity. I just decided to delete the section on Yes-No questions because the syntactic movement employed in English and French, seen as being a basis for French Influence, is completely unfounded and here's why.

The fact that English and French both invert auxilliaries doesn't prove that French influenced English. Inversion is a common way of creating Yes-No questions in many languages. Those that don't exhibit this property, such as Arabic and Irish Gaelic, have word that is present in such questions (h.al and aN respectively.)

In Universal Grammar, questions have the feature [+Q(uestion)] in the head of the Complementizer Phrase. This must be checked by an element in the specifier of the CP. In Arabic and Irish the words mentioned above fill this purpose. In English and French there are no such words. As a result a syntactic movement, known as T-to-C movement is employed. Whatever is in the Tense Phrase is raised to the CP.

Modern English inverts subjects and auxilliaries in Yes-No questions because it has characteristically weak inflection. As a result of weak inflection, semantically heavy verbs such as 'drive' can't rise from the Verb Phrase to the Tense Phrase and thus can't undergo T-to-C movement. Auxilliaries, which are semantically light, can occupy the TP and thus can experience this movement. Finally, in instances where there is no auxilliary in the Deep Structure form Do-Insertion is employed. The verb do is an expletive("dummy auxilliary") in this usage.

Modern French is characteristically strong and uses a mixture of Subject-Verb and Subject-Auxilliary inversion.

This section was obviously original research. It couldn't make heads or tails of what it was trying to say.

The source for my argument above: Carnie, Andrew. Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 2nd Edition. Padstow (Cornwall): T.J. International Ltd., 2006.

Any chance of having these sections back? It is very hard to comment on them when they have been zapped. I suspect there is a clash of disciplines. The article, what is left of it, seems to be from the discipline of philology, while the criticism is coming from the discipline of transformational generative linguistics. The article does seem to have weaknesses within the format of wikipedia, and has not managed to suggest appropriate references (probably conferences at the moment, as publishing in the area just isn't that quick), but it is not an atrocity, rather a concise summary of one of the most exciting ideas in language study at the moment. Graemedavis 21:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I've been thiking about this - while I don't think changes in word-order can prove the hypothesis, they may give support to it. I suspect the referencing for this article should be back to basic sources - for example the chapter "Element-Order" in Bruce Mitchell's "Old English Syntax" 1985 gives the concepts needed to understand word-order, and which I imagine have been applied here. Probably someone has looked specifically at word-order in Middle English and its support for the Creole hypothesis, where they have applied ideas from Mitchell and others to a set of data. I don't have the reference, but it would be amazing if there wasn't such an article/articles. Graemedavis 22:42, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Unclear

This sentence "The loss of agreement between modifiers is perhaps attributable to the reduction to schwa." needs more context to understand what it is claiming. Or perhaps it properly belongs to the following paragraph and not as a separate subject at the end of the paragraph it is currently in? Rmhermen 18:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Theory + other aspects

This is a very interesting theory and is in line with some of my thoughts on the subject. However, it should also be remembered that Old English came into frequent contact with two Celtic languages, and Norse, and that these should be taken into consideration too. Norse words are frequent in the north, and are often conflated with Anglo-Saxon ones. There is also some suggestion of Celtic influence on the syntax of English - this would be particularly the case in the north and the west, where people spoke a form of Welsh very late on (up til the modern period in the Welsh marches, and to the 12/1300s in Cumbria) - the Celtic languages have two genders like French. So the creole may be a three/four way one. --MacRusgail 01:42, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Romance and Germanic gender incompatibility

The article says that Middle English may have dropped grammatical gender because the Germanic and Romance systems of gender were and are incompatible. How so? Three-gender German doesn't seem to have any problem assimilating words from two-gender French (le niveau - das Niveau)--Witan (talk) 15:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

French influence in England was much higher than in Germany. French was the official/legal language in England for more than 200 years. The country was ruled by an elite whose members often spoke French as their native tongue. Both languages were widespread throughout the country, so the language contact was much stronger. --Universal-Interessierter^de (talk (de)) 01:23, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

List of words at end of article

At the end of the article, there is a list of words borrowed from French, introduced with the following language: "During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are:" It'd be nice if someone (particularly someone with OED access) checked me on this, but it looks like a lot of these words (e.g. "republic," "executive") didn't come into English until the 16th or 17th century, long after any period that could reasonably be described as the "reign of the Normans." PubliusFL (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I checked the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary, and you were correct about both words that you questioned: bellicose, benediction (15th); attorney general, malice aforethought (16th); executive, legislative, republic, court martial, decapitate (17th century). I'm concerned that not only does this article not have any sources, but the arguments seem to be weak (only my opinion). I don't doubt that it's a real theory, it just doesn't seem that the article really backs it up much. Creole's by definition come out of necessity, so I agree with the above poster that you can't use words that came into the language after that need was gone as evidence. There's no doubt that the English language is rich in vocabulary from many different languages, but the arguments don't seem to be very strong here for a creole. Also, shouldn't it be called either Anglo-Norman (as it's called in other articles) or at least Anglo-French? As I'm new and have never edited before, I'll let someone else do that Kman543210 (talk) 09:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

Just a small note on loss of gender, showing that this can indeed happen gradually. Some of the Nordic languages have lost some of their genders while other (Western Scandinavian) have retained all. Eg Danish has a Common gender that encompasses masc and fem while neutrum remains separate. In Swedish some three-gender remnants are still visible. Thus a gradual loss of gender has been seen here. The gender loss is more pronounced in Danish which has had a profound influence from Low German which though does have three genders, but the masc and femininum only distinguishable in the acussative case. 83.233.143.252 (talk) 20:16, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

References

I've added some references to indicate that far from being original research, this is a well-known area of discussion; many more could be found. On the matter of the list of French borrowings, I can't see that they add anything to the understanding of the issue here - is there a consesus for just deleting them? djnjwd (talk) 23:20, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Anthropologically speaking

The debate really came out of the Anthropological vs. Linguistic definitions of Creole. Anthropologically speaking, a creole is a language which has to be identified by the people who speak it, and being as the linguistic term for such a language didn't emerge until the colonial era, I doubt the speakers of Middle English could identify themselves as creole speakers. Linguistically speaking, I'd have to say it is a creole, because of the changes and patterns which even match other creoles developed. --Blackkdark (talk) 13:12, 9 August 2008 (UTC)

Focus of Article

The article should not just tell us what the claims and arguments of the theory are, but tell us the history of the theory itself (it was proposed by xyz...abc modified it in this way...it held currency in this period, but was later discredited etc etc). I've made the first step towards this. 129.67.20.167 (talk) 21:25, 3 March 2009 (UTC) It was first proposed by Bailey & Maroldt in an article called 'The French lineage of English

Several problems

• "However, the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa (i.e. to unpronounced vowels)" -- schwa is not an "unpronounced" vowel. Perhaps the writer meant that some schwas later dropped out.
• "English responded by dropping genders altogether, but this is only conjecture, and fails to reflect the fact that the neuter gender (it), prevalent in Old English, survives in Modern English." -- by this reasoning, English must still have masculine and feminine genders, since we have the pronouns "he" and "she". Survival of vestiges of gender marking only within pronouns doesn't imply survival of the gender system generally.
• "The French plural descends from oblique formations in Old French and is ultimately of pronominal, not nominal, origin" -- AFAIK, the French (oblique) plural comes from the Latin accusative nominal plural. Latin itself took some of its nominal plural markers from the pronominal system, but I don't know of anything going in the opposite direction. 71.13.148.220 (talk) 05:39, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

--I'm going to have to learn how to alter pages and get myself a name on here because It's now 2011 and no one has changed schwa to reflect that it is not an "unpronounced vowel" which would be no vowel at all (which has been the outcome of schwa in post-tonic positions, but that's besides the point. 98.64.228.212 (talk) 05:23, 29 July 2011 (UTC)Tom in Florida.

Thomason and Kaufman

This hypothesis has been treated in detail in Thomason & Kaufman (1988), with negative result: the extent of linguistic change during the Middle English period – especially compared to the immediately adjacent periods – has been grossly overstated. This needs to be worked into the article. Also, it has been proposed that simplifications of the morphology started already in Northumbrian Old English, before any Viking (much less Norman) had even set foot on British soil. In The Celtic Roots of English, the possibility of Brythonic substrate influence in Northern England has been canvassed. This does seem more plausible, or at least possible, being compatible with the actual facts. However, similar simplifications as those seen in English can be observed in related Germanic languages across the North Sea such as Danish, Dutch or Low German, and the role of language contact across the North Sea should not be neglected: it is said that the North Sea acted more as a pathway of communication than a barrier. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:02, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

It's evident that grammar simplification proceeded from the North but I rather doubt that there's any way to prove that it began before the Vikings arrived. The Vikings already starting attacking in the last 700's, and started settling in 851. We have few records of Northumbrian Old English from before that time.

I've heard it actually said that confusion of the endings begin around 950 AD in the North (hence after and probably due to pressure from Norse speakers) and moved southward from there, reaching the southern coast (i.e. southwest England) around 1050 AD.

I think a lot of the confusion over the evident enormous change in the language stems from a lack of clear understanding of the history. Written Old English of the Late West Saxon variety, which came to predominate, was a well-standardized, fully-fledged literary language that was capable of competently translating all sorts of complex philosophical and technical texts from Latin, as well as composing new ones. It was given a great impetus by King Alfred of Wessex and essentially created in the late 800's in Wessex (southwest England). Scandinavian vocabulary and grammar changes had not yet reached this area, which was far from the Danelaw, and England had a vibrant tradition of oral poetry, a tradition maintained better than that of any other West Germanic group, and stretching back in an unbroken chain likely to early Proto-Germanic times, before Christ. As a result it preserved a great deal of formal, high-register words that might be rare in speech or vanished entirely. Many of these words were pressed into service in the literary language, and many more were created using the native word-formation rules, to provide suitable translations for avalanches of Latin terms. This language was almost entirely composed of words of native stock, with essentially no Scandinavian or French influence and relatively few directly borrowed Latin words, as loan translation was much preferred.

After the Norman invasion in 1066, the English-speaking upper class was dispossessed. The literary language disappeared into obscurity and the chain of oral poetry was broken. All commerce, government, literature, poetry and science was done in French or Latin. As a result, a vast number of words disappeared -- pretty much the entire stock of literary and poetic words, in fact, along with a large number of words that were common in mid or high-register speech but for which there were simpler, lower-register synonyms, since there was little need ever to express yourself in English in anything but a fairly low, informal register.

English started to gain momentum in the 1200's, and by the late 1200's, French was rapidly dying out. By the 1300's, only the high nobility spoke French natively, and within a generation or two, no one did. English was resurrected again and made into a literary language. But:

1. It was the spoken English of London, not Wessex. Not only had it lost all the words mentioned above, but it was at the edge of the Danelaw and suffered heavy Scandinavian influence, which tossed out a lot more native words and replaced them with Norse words.
2. The centuries of cohabitation between English and French speakers, and the large number of bilinguals, meant that a large number of French words naturally entered English, in the process tossing out more native words.
3. During the 1200's, as English started to be used as a high-register language, French words started trickling in to supply the missing high-register words that had fallen out of use. By the early 1300's, as a newly English-speaking nobility tried to do all their customary pursuits (which mostly required a high-register language) in English, this trickle had become a flood, bringing in enormous numbers of French words, many of which entered even if there was already a suitable English word. This could have been for any number of reasons, either just due to fashion, or because the French word occurred in a lot of set expressions, or because the French word had various specialized or semi-specialized usages in particular contexts, etc. These often pushed out native words as well.
4. When words for new concepts were needed, they were usually coined using French (and later Latin) word-formation rules, rather than native word-formation rules. As a result, nearly all productive modern prefixes and most suffixes are Romance rather than Germanic in origin.
5. Even the forms of poetry and artistic literature were based on French rather than native models. (Surprisingly, a remnant of the old poetic tradition did survive the dry years, in areas like the West Midlands that were isolated both from Scandinavian and Norman French. These reasserted themselves in the 1300's along with the general resurgence in English writing, and for a brief period there was a great flowering of alliterative verse, including many old native poetic words. However, this was an isolated incident, gone already by 1400.)

So not surprisingly English looked enormously different. Structurally, it also looked different, but this didn't happen in one big whump. At least in the south and southwest, English up till 1225 or so actually had a case/gender system much like Modern German, with 4 cases, 3 genders and case marking on determiners and strong adjectives, but not on nouns. This system fell apart fairly suddenly after that; by 1300 there were no cases and no genders (although the old case/gender system survived until 1325 or so in a part of Kent, southeast England). Apparently the loss of case and gender had begun substantially earlier in the north, continuing a pattern of northern influence. Now there's nothing that says that case and gender have to be lost together, but in some ways it's not too surprising. Nothing in the morphology of most nouns indicated their gender, and gender agreement was marked only on determiners and strong adjectives -- and by the early 1200's, strong adjective marking had vanished, leaving only the determiners themselves pretty much the only way to determine what a noun's gender was. The case system was already somewhat redundant in that e.g. nominative and accusative were not distinguished except in masculine singular, so the word order had already become fairly fixed. A natural way of eliminating the now-redundant case markers was to simply pick the stem of the determiner and use it invariably. For the definite article, this led to the stem the -- and gender disappeared automatically as a consequence.

These sorts of changes are natural, and have occurred all over Europe (e.g. case loss in Vulgar Latin; Macedonian/Bulgarian vs. other Slavic languages; mainland Scandinavian languages; etc.). Probably the continued mixing of Norse and English spurred many of the changes, and it's probably not coincidental that the loss of case/gender in southern England occurred precisely when large numbers of French speakers were moving to English. But it seems at overall the changes were going to happen anyway. Benwing (talk) 10:56, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

Do read the mentioned literature if you haven't already; it might answer some of your questions or objections.

There does seem to be quite some evidence for Old Northumbrian; even if there's not much in the way of connected texts, names and glosses or inserts in Latin documents (including short sentences) might conceivably suffice to get a rough, general picture of what was going on.

Let me point out the conclusion here: Certain continuity between Late Northumbrian and Northern Middle English (at least at the morphological level) cannot be denied, and leads us to believe that the morphological simplification of Northern Middle English started long before the Scandinavian influence could be felt in the North. I think the point is that while there clearly were Scandinavians living in Britain already in the 9th/10th century, in the Danelaw, if this fact hadn't led to morphological simplification in the south, the morphological simplification seen in 10th century Northumbria cannot be explained with Scandinavian influence as the conditions were analogous and I can't think of any reason which would have made Old English morphology in the south more resistant. By all appearances, neither can the cited authors. However, Celtic was clearly still spoken in Northern England at the time, and as vigorous as in contemporary Cornwall – and likely Devon – in stark contrast to Wessex and the remainder of southern Britain, where we have no evidence for Celtic surviving that long, and no reason to even suspect that it might have survived). Therefore, the Celtic hypothesis does have something going for it.

There's a further catch: Old English and Old Norse (especially nominal) morphology, in the 8th/9th century, must have been closely similar (just think of the -a and -um endings in the plural, or the consonant stem declensions). These two languages were – structurally even more than genetically – really similar. It beggars belief to assume that the differences between the languages could not be bridged except by throwing the (especially nominal) morphology out entirely. Therefore, I've always found the Norse hypothesis unconvincing. In contrast, the idea that speakers of early medieval British Celtic – with no cases anymore, only two genders, and a very different verbal system – had trouble with the Old English morphology is a lot more sensible. If any such explanation is desired at all. At least it does tie in nicely with the fact that the analogous simplifications seen at the opposing coasts only start in the Late Middle Ages. If they were encouraged by contact with other Germanic languages, English would have to have been the model, at least initially.

That said, I feel more and more inclined to agree with Thomason and Kaufman that the amount of change in the vocabulary has been much exaggerated, as well, at least for the period in question. They actually do point out late dialect glossaries as evidence that the influx of French words hadn't crowded out the inherited Old English/Germanic lexicon radically yet, at the time, and that the influence on the spoken language was more limited than is generally assumed. Rather, it appears that the main move towards Latinisation of the lexicon only gained momentum long after the demise of Anglo-Norman, in the Renaissance. My own impression agrees with this: I keep being surprised how many words – frequently cognates of familiar German words, fair and precious little cognates that I had either not met before or whose meaning or etymology had not been clear to me – that I thought had long been gone from English, still turn up in various nooks and crannies of the modern language, as archaic relics at the very least (sometimes restricted in meaning or occurrence, limited to particular turns of phrases or formulae), dialect words, and sometimes even more than that, and a fortiori they must still have been current in Middle English and also (even if increasingly threatened by obsolescence and already perceived as dated or rural) in the Early Modern period. There are also grammatical relics that I keep encountering, and which make English appear considerably less deviant than I thought when my grasp of the language was not as firm yet (of course, you never stop learning, really). A lot of the rare, strikingly German looking lexemes and usages are definitely outdated or marginalised, but the point is that they are still there and not quite gone entirely; when they have been around for so long, it seems old habits really do die hard. Much as three main layers of vocabulary, native, Chinese and European (nowadays mainly English) co-exist in Japanese, so do Germanic, French and Latin synonyms keep living side by side in English, even if the old Anglo-Saxon cognate just barely survives, as in specialised uses, like fossils, or insects encased in amber: medieval ruins telling of past greatness, a remote echo of the Anglo-Saxons and their continental origins. There's something very Tolkienesque about it when I think of it. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:10, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

That is some of the most evocative language I have read recently. It seems that it is not consonant with WP’s encyclopedic style (would that it were so!), but I hope you can find places to apply some of that phrasing to articles themselves, instead of only Talk pages. Jmacwiki (talk) 23:10, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

@Benwing: So, you think that a case system that does not differ between nominative amd accusative case in the most word forms (by their number, not by their usage; the first and second-person pronouns which do have different forms occur much more often than most nouns) is redundant and enforcing a strict word order? Then I ask you and myself how I can be thinking in such a case system as you described for Early Middle English natively. A system that has been existing in my language very stable for centuries now, including a relatively free word order. You were assuming that such a case system almost naturally would lead to a restricted word order before the speakers will abandon it. But that has not happened in German. --03:35, 30 December 2022 (UTC) Universal-Interessierter^de (talk (de)) 03:35, 30 December 2022 (UTC)

I find it amusing that the talkpage discussion of this article is rather more learned and encyclopedic than the rather modest collection of material in main namespace. This article should focus on the scholarly theory. The collection of undisputed facts on the changes undergone in Middle English would clearly belong on the Middle English page. --dab (𒁳) 11:28, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Almost nothing in this article is about the creolization theory

The entire "French influence on Middle English" section is no more than a rundown of ways French influenced English, or may have influenced it, without even suggesting that any of these influences, all of them of an unremarkable nature, beg for creolization to explain them. I suggest that it be removed altogether unless someone can rewrite it to concentrate on details of the evolution of English that are difficult to explain without resorting to a creolization hypothesis. Otherwise, it's only a repetition of what should already be covered in the main article covering the history of the English language. Largoplazo (talk) 14:42, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

@Largoplazo: I have accidentally stumbled across this, and totally agree. The sources in "Influence of Old Norse" and "Influence of Norman French" don't cover the creolization, and the text in these sections does not even WP:SYNTH (← it's a wikiverb!) these influences with the creolization hypothesis. I will delete both sections as unrelated per WP:COATRACK, without merging the infomation anywehere, since it is all covered in History of English and Influence of French on English.

What would make sense here is to include John McWhorter's musings about this topic. While personally I am quite sceptical about his default assumption of imperfect adult-acquisition just because a language has changed in a similar way to that of creoles, his hypothesis is notable and definitely due for inclusion. –Austronesier (talk) 08:04, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

French influence on [v ð z]

How is this statement to be understood? "French influence has affected English pronunciation as well. Whereas Old English had the unvoiced fricative sounds [f], [s], [θ] (as in thin), and [ʃ] (shin), French influence helped to distinguish their voiced counterparts [v], [z], [ð] (the), and [ʒ] (mirage)" Old English already had the phones [v ð z]. I've edited the article, so it informs readers about this fact. The only thing I can imagine is that French helped establish phonemes by creating minimal pairs with these sounds. Tobiornot2b 22:00, 02 Jan 2019 (UTC)

Addressing parliament in English?

The article says:

English began to retake its position from French as England's official national language by 1362 when, under Edward III, Parliament was addressed in English for the first time since the Norman Conquest of 1066.

But the citation here is a reference to the Pleading in English Act 1362 which as near as I can tell doesn't relate to Parliament at all, but rather is about the langauge used in law courts. (Also, ironically, the text of the law being linked to is in French.) --Jfruh (talk) 19:30, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

No pidgin?

The article starts by defining (appositionally) a creole as arising from a pidgin. That does not apply to English. Moreover, that contradicts what the Creole language article itself says of the relationship to pidgins. I haven't edited that (it's a little more technical than I am comfortable changing), but I hope someone will. Jmacwiki (talk) 06:55, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

A classic creole derives from a pidgin, but I don't think that any intellectually-respectable version of the Middle English creole hypothesis proposes that the main line of the development of the English language went through a pidgin stage. Rather, it is proposed that there were simplified contact languages used between speakers of different languages (English-Norse and English-French), and that features of these contact languages influenced the development of English... AnonMoos (talk) 11:21, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

"Pidgin" = "simplified contact language" (I mean, just read the first sentence at Pidgin). Based on that equivalence, "Middle English arose, not from pidgins, but from pidgins" (or, possibly, "not from a pidgin, but from pidgins") is an accurate restatement of your comments.

Even if I'd glossed over that detail, I'd have to read the rest of it as "Because a creole develops from a pidgin and Middle English didn't go through a pidgin stage, but the hypothesis sounds appealing, let's contrive a new, purely ad hoc definition of 'creole' in a manner that will make the hypothesis true." I know that sounds sarcastic and caustic, the way I've put it, but it really does neutrally represent my understanding of your remarks.

Given that language simplification occurs and has occurred in languages worldwide over the millennia, either spontaneously or by influence from other languages, with no creolization being involved, I'm really not seeing the motivation for invoking creolization when it comes to English, especially if no one's claiming any pidginization--a sine qua non of creolization as that word is defined--came into play. Largoplazo (talk) 16:06, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

An English-Norse contact language could have had some features of a pidgin and some features of a koine, given that they were both Germanic languages (not close enough for easy mutual comprehensibility, but having many structural parallelisms).

In any case, on Caribbean islands, you have the "basilect" (Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole etc), the "acrolect" (standard French, standard English etc), and "mesolects" which are intermediate between the two. If basilectal features are making their way up the continuum of social acceptability, and are used rather freely in most contexts except communicating with foreigners, then you could say that the language varieties on the upper end of the sociolinguistic spectrum are undergoing a certain degreee of "creolization"... AnonMoos (talk) 20:10, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

P.S. The meaning of the first sentence of my comments of "11:21, 22 August 2020" is that standard English cannot itself have evolved directly out of a pidgin, since it's lacking many linguistic features typical of languages with that history. However, that doesn't mean that standard English couldn't have been historically influenced by simplified contact langages. The Middle English creole hypothesis has suffered from some of its adherents being very enthusiastic and linguistically unsophisticated, but it's not self-evidently absurd in its more moderate formulations. Many linguists doubt whether it can account for major changes in English, but it's not inherently a ridiculous idea... AnonMoos (talk) 20:30, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Our article on basilects, acrolects, and mesolects is Post-creole continuum... AnonMoos (talk) 19:39, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

P.S. Here's how the hypothetical Old English / Old Norse simplified contact language is described in Languages of the British Isles Past and Present by W.B. Lockwood (1975, ISBN 0-233-96666-8): "The assimilation of Norse speakers [in England] was doubtless facilitated by the similarity between Old Norse and Old English. It seems likely that over wide areas [of North England] a compromise colloquial arose, a Scandinavian-English dialect which concentrated on basic comprehension without undue regard for grammatical niceties. ... Certainly Norse influence hastened that loss of inflections which proceeded slowly from north to south [in England] during the next three centuries." -- AnonMoos (talk) 19:31, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

So... can somebody knowledgeable here edit the article at least a little, to improve matters? Or is this one of those articles that's protected by guardians who will start an edit war as soon as that's attempted? Jmacwiki (talk) 23:56, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Note that the form of Old Norse spoken by the vikings who invaded Northern England was not very different from the form of Old English spoken by the people in Northern England, see here. Count Iblis (talk) 18:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm kind of skeptical of mutual intercomprehensibility between Old English and Old Norse, in the sense that an Old English speaker who had never heard any Old Norse and an Old Norse speaker who had never heard any Old English could supposedly understand each other easily (I doubt it). What is actually true is that there were many structural parallelisms between Old English and Old Norse, so that if a speaker of one language could learn to accommodate and compensate for the systematic differences (phonological correspondences, morphological correspondences, etc), their ability to understand the other language would increase with a sharply-rising curve. (Sorry I can't view Youtube with my current configuration...) -- AnonMoos (talk) 18:35, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Bias or consensus?

By my reading, under the interpretation that creolization is a continuum process (so partial creolization is possible), the article makes a much stronger case for the presence of the process in the history of English than against it, particularly for OE with Old Norse.

That’s especially true given that both are Germanic, so the objection that English preserves many Germanic properties that creolization typically loses — and therefore that it contradicts the hypothesis — is a weak one. (If that weakness is not true, the article needs to explain why not.)

Is this deliberate? That is, is there a consensus that ME was indeed a partial creolization (at least from ON), or is there some bias in the presentation? Does the article need to be rewritten to reflect much more doubt about that?

Also, what of Norman French, for which the article presents no discussion, nor any evidence, despite beginning with that case? Jmacwiki (talk) 06:46, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

@Jmacwiki: As for the last part of the question: the article did have information about the influence of Norman French and Old Norse, but I removed it[1] (see also the discussion above), because the sources cited did not discuss this in the context of the creolization hypothesis, so the bias in the presentation (WP:synthesis of partially related material to prove a point) was even worse then. Obviously, this article badly needs a further cleanup using sources which explicitly support, reject, or – ideally – review the creolization hypothesis. All discussions here have died off in OR speculations. –Austronesier (talk) 12:42, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

@Austronesier: Per my comments above, the dearth of sources and the consequential shortness of the article, I get the impression that the hypothesis, while perhaps somewhat popular in pop-linguistic circles, has never been generated much interest among professional linguists, has been refuted fairly decisively (the article still does not note this, or mention Thomason and Kaufman's book, at all), or, in any case, remains marginal, or is marginal today, and is even more properly classified as a fringe hypothesis. In particular, the specific sociohistorical circumstances characteristic of the genesis of pidgin and creole languages do not seem to have been present at any point in medieval England. See also, for example, Creole language § Exceptionalism (and the following section "Controversy"). As such, I remain very sceptical of the value, especially the explanatory value, of the hypothesis, and the extent to which it is even taken seriously in professional linguistic circles. In short, I do not think it is taken particularly seriously by a lot of linguists, and most of them would even disagree that Middle English is in any meaningful way creolised, let alone even a creole language. What do you think? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:28, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

@Florian Blaschke: I have found a perfect recent secondary source about it[2]. The abstract will be disappointing for pop-linguistic creolization buffs ("This chapter broadly rejects the creolization hypothesis put forward by Thomason and Kaufman (1977)."), but it represents the mainstream, as can be gathered from chapters §9.4.1 and §10.4.3 in the same volume. If you cannot access the book via the WP Library, I can send it to you via email. –Austronesier (talk) 10:51, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Perfect! Thank you so much. So my conclusion was essentially correct. (That said, the linked source does acknowledge the creole hypothesis as valuable, and appears to agree with it at least in part, while also pointing out that no creolisation in the proper sense has taken place.)

However, the book is from 1988, not 1977. Apparently Bailey and Maroldt (1977) is meant? That's confusing ... As pointed out above, Thomason and Kaufman refuted the hypothesis, they didn't posit it! Oof ... I just managed to download the PDF and found that the introductory paragraph of the chapter really says that. What an embarrassing mistake! --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:27, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

This progress sounds very attractive for the article.

I will say, though, that the logician in me is very skeptical of claims that all the features of creolization can only happen when starting from a pidgin - and therefore that, if only some of the simplifications or reductions in a pidgin occurred (say, in declension or grammatical tense, but not consonant clusters), then the developments that are characteristic of creoles must not have happened, even along those dimensions. That's the sort of very strong negative claim that would persuade me to slap on a "[very strong] reference needed" note.

FWIW, the hypothesis for (partial) creolization seems much stronger for the OE/ON interaction [collision?] than the (OE+ON)/Norman French one. That is, Middle and Modern English retain strong Germanic elements, albeit much simplified from old West and North Germanic forms, whereas the NF contribution is largely in vocabulary: English seems to have acquired virtually nothing in morphology or syntax from NF, and not even much in phonology. (Not sure about semiotics.) True? I say this in part because of what I have seen in this and related articles, so if it's wrong, there is even more editing to do.

I do not claim great expertise here, though I do have some - and I am at least representative of historically minded and linguistically inclined readers who would find the topic fascinating but the article ... disappointing. Jmacwiki (talk) 22:24, 29 October 2021 (UTC)

A few scholars have claimed that the prevalence of the -s plural ending in medieval English was reinforced by contact with old French (though this has little to do with creolization). For phonology, it's quite dubious whether there would be any kind of separate "zh" phoneme in modern English without palatalization processes occurring in borrowed French words in English (though this was a long indirect process which wasn't completed until after Middle English, and has nothing to do with creolization). AnonMoos (talk) 19:02, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Aha. Thanks, nice points. (I learned something - even though that’s not the point of a Talk page).

As someone noted here long ago, the quality of content on this Talk page greatly exceeds the quality on the article’s own page! Jmacwiki (talk) 19:57, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

Recent changes (November 2023)

New text incorporates three needed improvements. (1) Whether ME is a “creole” depends entirely on how one defines “creole”. Much of the debate over the ME creole question is debate over the definition, not over the linguistic or sociohistorical facts. This has been clarified. (2) Definitions aside, there *is* a robust consensus that ME is grammatically highly streamlined compared with OE, and that the source of the streamlining is/was contact with speakers of other languages. This point transcends the “creole” debate and needed to be highlighted. (3) Arguably the person who has contributed most to this debate over the last two decades is John McWhorter, who was not cited at all in the existing page. This oversight has been corrected. Many additional references were added as well. LyleHoward (talk) 19:39, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Genetic studies demonstrate that the English people are a combination of relatively recent migrants from continental Germanic speaking areas and British "natives" who were likely Celtic speakers. It would have been as much of a challenge for Celtic speakers to learn proper Anglo-Saxon as it is for modern English speakers to master a Celtic language. Certainly, Celtic speakers would have created an Anglo-Saxon creole by dropping some of the Germanic grammatical peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon. Gortaleen (talk) 10:34, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

Creoles aren't created. Pidgins are, and creoles then develop from them as they become grammatically fleshed out. No pidgin has been found in the British Isles as far as I know, so conjectures that English is a creole are just that, conjectures. I don't see any more pressing a reason to believe there has to have been a pidgin than there is that one arose when Latin made contact with Frankish as French was forming, when Turkic languages came into contact with Arabic and Persian as Turkish was forming, etc. It's unremarkable that grammatical features pass between languages, hence sprachbunds, such as where the preterite has vanished from conversation and where the auxiliary meaning "to be" is used instead of the one meaning "to have" for forming the perfect forms of similar classes of verbs in both French and German. (I know that none of this, coming from me, serves as a basis for working out what the article should say. I'm just responding to Gortaleen.) Largoplazo (talk) 13:11, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

It's not conjecture if there is evidence. There's certainly evidence to support English being a creole of Anglo-Saxon created by British Celtic speakers. Further evidence could be derived from analysis of how known creoles (e.g., Haitian creole) and possible creoles such as Vulgar Latin developed. Gortaleen (talk) 13:24, 6 June 2024 (UTC)

If you have a source that projects the purported "creolization" (usually dated post-Hastings or sometimes to the Danelaw period) back to the time when Brythonic speakers mass-shifted to Old English, you can present it here for discussion whether we want to include it in the article. Obviously, it can't be a genetic study, but only from the field that can identify creolization based on language-based facts, i.e. linguistics. As @Largoplazo already has pointed out, you should be aware that contact sitations such as happened in the centuries after the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain are not unusual at all, and generally produce contact-induced linguistic phenomena that are very different from creolization. –Austronesier (talk) 16:39, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

past perfect from French

In the Middle English as a French creole section it states "such as expression of the perfect aspect using the verb "to have" (as in “she has eaten’")" - this cannot be true, the past perfect using "have" existed in Old English, and exists in all Germanic languages today. This should be removed. If these were arguments proposed by the listed authors, then something should be added notifying the reader that some if not all of these propositions are unsupported and hold no real validity. Leasnam (talk) 19:30, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

There was a medieval western European sprachbund of a contrast between a simple past vs. a compound past formed by HAVE + participle for transitive verbs, and BE + participle for intransitive verbs. I don't think this was fully developed in Old English yet... AnonMoos (talk) 00:23, 13 December 2023 (UTC)