English is not a creole of Middle English and French. English has many loan words from French, but loan words do not make a creole, as others have mentioned.
However, English is a creole: of Anglo-saxon and the Old Norse dialect spoken in the Dane-law. The two languages were closely related; the primary differences were in noun case-endings and the verb tense-endings. The resulting creole kept the word roots (which were nearly the same) and simplified the endings. This led to Middle English’s distinct lack of endings, as compared to other Germanic languages.
Pleonast: You are correct. English is not a creole of Middle English and French. [Middle] English is largely a “mixture” of Old English and French. Is the Old Norse/Anglo Saxon mixture really considered a creole by linguists? I know these things don’t have precise definitions that everyone agrees on, and I’ve heard the theory you are talking about wrt case endings etc, but I’ve never heard it was as well proven and generally accepted as you are implying.
John Mace, I believe the theory of ending simplification between Anglo-saxon and Old Norse is generally accepted. Whether or not this constitutes creolization is more controversial. (I had considered mentioning this in my post, but decided to omit it for brevity.)
The problem is that there is not a widely-accepted precise definition of a creole language. Generally, there must be a synthesis of the grammars. But what about the case we have here, where the grammars of the two languages were virtually identical? It is hard to test this example for creolization.
Because one of the classic indicators of creolization is ending-simplification, my opinion is that early Middle English should be considered a creole. Late Middle English includes many word borrowings from Norman French, but the grammar of Late ME remained distinctly Germanic and so no creolization occurred then.
You might get better results if you Googled “Taglish”.
Would one of you cunning linguists weigh in on whether Tagalog as she is currently spoke a creole? If we go by Cecil’s definition of “a pidgin that has become a culture’s primary language”, then it’s not, because it was never a pidgin to begin with. Another complication is that most Filipinos are bilingual (or trilingual, even) and can speak (pure) English with varying degrees of fluency.
Does the occasional reversal of the normal English pattern of adjective noun to the French * noun adjective* qualify? It’s not exactly common, but you see it in certain terms (e.g. “surgeon general”) or poetic language (e.g. “once upon a midnight dreary”).
You lost me on the Late/Early Middle English thing on grammer. Are you implying that Early Middle English had Frenchified grammer, but that it reverted back to Germanic grammer in the Late Middle period?
Perhaps not. Ethnologue part of SIL International, a fundamentalist Christian organisation that strongly favours dangerously sending missionaries to some of the world’s most fragile cultures. Information about language families can be found elsewhere on the web, there’s no need to support a controversial organisation that - seeing how the SDMB likes to fight fundamentalism - most of us should abhor.
That is not at all what he is saying. Try to follow the actual writing.
Early Middle English is a creole of West Germanic (Frisian, Angle, Saxon, Jute, etc.–often lumped together in to “Old English”) and North Germanic (Danish, Norwegian, etc.) origins. The two language groups fused together into a creole that preserved many roots but eleminated nearly all word endings, instead working out a word order based syntax.
This creole is early Middle English. It is purely Germanic, but it is a creole, nonetheless.
Then the creole had a large infusion of Norman-French vocabulary that did not substantially alter the underlying structure.
Early Middle English has simplified case-endings because of hybridization (some would say creolization) between Anglo-saxon and Old Norse. Both AS and ON have Germanic grammars. Early ME also has Germanic grammar.
Late Middle English has the grammar of Early ME, but with a massive influx of Norman French loan words. This is definitely not creolization because ME retained its original Germanic grammar. There are a few examples of Romance grammar (“surgeon general”, etc.), but these are isolated occurances.
Terminus Est, I am not familiar with Tagalog. But from the descriptions in this thread I would say there is no creolization, only massive word borrowings. And the answer depends on how much of the “core” language remains Tagalog-like (as the core of ME remained Germanic). It can be subjective.
On preview, I see Dogface, has answered the question also. And well too!
I guess my confusion is with the term Early Middle English. The Scandanavian invasion of Britain was in the 9th century, while the Norman invasion was 200 years later. Wouldn’t the creolization have happened during that time frame and not afterwards? I’m not familiar with any pre-1066 language being called Middle English. After 1066 it seem that it would be hard to seperate the French and Old Norse influence on the grammatical endings of English.
Perhaps someone can clarify the official definition of Old vs Middle English, or if there is a difference between Late Old English and Early Middle English. Had the proposal been that Late Old English was a creole, I wouldn’t have thought “French”.
We shouldn’t continue this hijack much further, but one more post.
Yeah, you’re absolutely right about Old vs Middle English terminology. Pre-Norman-invasion English should definitely be called Old English. The boundaries are somewhat arbitrary from a linguistics stand-point, and I mislabeled them in my previous posts. I should’ve just used centuries to label the languages; my timelines are correct in any case.
Well, I think the thread was pretty much concluded as far as the OP was concerned, and I was enjoying the exchange on Old English. AINAL(inguist), but it’s a favorite hobby.
Maybe I’ll start a GD thread on whether or not Late Old English is a creole language. Can you create a creole from two “languages” that might reasonably be called dialects? I wonder how much interest there would be in that…
I’m not a linguist either, although it’s a hobby of mine (thus by linguistics-nerd name “Pleonast”). The topic may be too specialized to get much interest (GD seems dominated by politics). A new thread GQ would probably be better, especially if we can keep it factual.
I was mostly joking about the new thread. We might get one or two other posterd. Heck, I’ll do it just to see what happens. At worst it’ll cause some quizzed looks.
Oh, yeah, and I guess one could say that if Late Old English is a creole language, then those versions of English following it are also creole languages.
No. The examples you gave are what linguists call “fossilized” constructions. They exist only as set borrowed phrases. That foreign word order cannot be productive of new English phrases … because … English grammar just does not work that way. The Germanic pattern always puts the adjective before the noun it modifies. Always. Reversing the word order to fit a line of poetry is caused by requirements of metrical scansion, not by French influence. English grammar has been much worn down and simplified over the past 900 years, but what remains of it is still 100% Germanic in origin.
