And it’s not even slightly sorryEnglish - the language which drags other languages into back alleys & mugs them for useful vocabulary
A Blunted Sickle - Thread II
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And occasionally it will slip other languages a bit of vocabulary when they're not looking - 'Le weekend' anyone.
Errolwi
Monthly Donor
Original popular version of thatEnglish - the language which drags other languages into back alleys & mugs them for useful vocabulary
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
I am reminded of Jerry Pournelle's crack about English being a language invented by Norman men-at-arms to pick up Saxon barmaids.
After one has observed how shameless the English language is about plundering other languages for loose vocabulary items, it is interesting to read the academic debate about the role of creolization in the history of English. For those of you unfamiliar, a "creole" is what happens when a pidgin or contact language becomes a native language for children born in the contact zone. Creoles often - not always, but often - retain the grammatical simplicity typical of pidgins, while reabsorbing more vocabulary from one or both of the languages that met at the contact zone (the fancy term for this is "relexification").
It is very clear that English went through at least one creolization phase after the Norman invasion of England; Middle English is best understood as a creole derived from a contact pidgin formed when Anglo-Saxon collided with Norman French (thus those Norman men-at-arms and Saxon barmaids). But there are strong indications in the grammar and core vocabulary of English that late Anglo-Saxon itself was heavily influenced by a creole formed in the Danelaw after contact between middle Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. It is difficult to be certain because no records of the earlier contact pidgin survive. That would have begun to form as invading Vikings settled in East Anglia in the 870s, aided by the fact that at that time there was still a fair amount of mutual intelligibility between Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse.
There are tantalizing hints of yet a third creolization episode three hundred years earlier resulting from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Celtic Britain.
The result of all this history is that English has been stripped to its grammatical running gears and relexified at least once and possibly as many as three times. English grammar retains the stark simplicity and regular SVO word order characteristic of pidgins and other areal trade languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Malayo-Indonesian. These are traits which make these contact languages easy for adults to learn.
Most Germanic languages have been very bad at spreading outside their original home areas - indeed they have often failed to hold on to their speaker populations, as when Norman French replaced Norse in Normandy within a generation and a half of the Viking seizure. English is the one spectacular exception, and it is completely reasonable to suppose that its retention of pidgin-like simplicity explains this. Repeated creolizations have made English impure as all hell and nearly as easy to spread as the common cold.
Is it any wonder then, that we eagerly hoover up vocabulary from other languages? Relexification from any language it meets seems to be a recurring pattern in English going back 1500 years.
After one has observed how shameless the English language is about plundering other languages for loose vocabulary items, it is interesting to read the academic debate about the role of creolization in the history of English. For those of you unfamiliar, a "creole" is what happens when a pidgin or contact language becomes a native language for children born in the contact zone. Creoles often - not always, but often - retain the grammatical simplicity typical of pidgins, while reabsorbing more vocabulary from one or both of the languages that met at the contact zone (the fancy term for this is "relexification").
It is very clear that English went through at least one creolization phase after the Norman invasion of England; Middle English is best understood as a creole derived from a contact pidgin formed when Anglo-Saxon collided with Norman French (thus those Norman men-at-arms and Saxon barmaids). But there are strong indications in the grammar and core vocabulary of English that late Anglo-Saxon itself was heavily influenced by a creole formed in the Danelaw after contact between middle Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. It is difficult to be certain because no records of the earlier contact pidgin survive. That would have begun to form as invading Vikings settled in East Anglia in the 870s, aided by the fact that at that time there was still a fair amount of mutual intelligibility between Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse.
There are tantalizing hints of yet a third creolization episode three hundred years earlier resulting from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Celtic Britain.
The result of all this history is that English has been stripped to its grammatical running gears and relexified at least once and possibly as many as three times. English grammar retains the stark simplicity and regular SVO word order characteristic of pidgins and other areal trade languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Malayo-Indonesian. These are traits which make these contact languages easy for adults to learn.
Most Germanic languages have been very bad at spreading outside their original home areas - indeed they have often failed to hold on to their speaker populations, as when Norman French replaced Norse in Normandy within a generation and a half of the Viking seizure. English is the one spectacular exception, and it is completely reasonable to suppose that its retention of pidgin-like simplicity explains this. Repeated creolizations have made English impure as all hell and nearly as easy to spread as the common cold.
Is it any wonder then, that we eagerly hoover up vocabulary from other languages? Relexification from any language it meets seems to be a recurring pattern in English going back 1500 years.
Reminds me of one of the funniest exchanges between Del Boy and 'Dave'
Del: My favouritist meal is Duck à l'Orange,but I don't know how to say that in French.
Rodney:It's canard.
D:You can say that again bruv!
What you refer to as very clear (that there's any creolization in English) is by my reading a very disputed idea.
English has certainly lost traits that the other Germanic languages have, but most have them have suffered similar losses in grammar as English. The Genitive in Dutch stuck around longer than in English, but it too went the way of the dodo, and Frisian too has lost grammatical cases.
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
It is very disputed. But the dispute seems to me to be be mainly a definitional one rather than any substantive argument about what actually happened to English. As just one example: Middle English really did adopt pronouns imported from Old Norse, and that kind of change in the core vocabulary of a language doesn't generally happen without an intrusion at least as disruptive as a creolization episode. If you want to call it partial language replacement or something else, fine - but that's not an explanatory advance over "creolization", you're still describing a radical change in native speech that happened at a contact frontier.
Sometimes these "disputes" are much ado about nothing, academic politics and fashion masquerading as a real change in generative explanations. I think the reaction against the entire creolization hypothesis is one such case. I'd be much more interested in (for example) a substantive argument against the hypothesized first creolization between early Anglo-Saxon and the Brittonic languages, that being the one for which the evidence is thinnest.
Myself, I have a strong suspicion - based on what we've seen as a normal adaptation pattern after successful invasions - that if we had enough documentation from the Danelaw period we would discover a dialect continuum: Anglo Saxon as substrate, Norse as superstrate, and individuals shifting registers between them depending on whether it's an "outside" or "inside" context and the social status of the people they're interacting with. There's actual documentary evidence for such a dialect continuum spanning late Anglo-Saxon and Norman French after the Norman invasion - in fact some traces of that continuum ares still present in registers of modern English.
A good present-day parallel would be Jamaica, where most people people speak a language with Africanized vocabulary and grammar when en famille but shift to something much more like standard British English when doing business. Anybody who gets struck on arguments about whether the Jamaican situation is "creolization" is rather missing the point of what actually happens there.
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While this is an extremely fascinating discussion, perhaps we should not derail the thread of one of the best TLs on this forum with it.
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
Hey, I'd like more timeline content as much as you would. But as quiescent as it's been here recently who can blame people for wandering off into interesting digressions?
Get well quick, pdf27!
I think a key topic is also - were old Norse and Anglo-Saxon that different?
Because dialects are often rather less picky when borrowing from neighbour dialects than languages are, simply because features fit straight-away. So a Fleming moving to the eastern Netherlands (or vice-versa) will often end up speaking a kind of inbetween dialect that is mostly Flemish but has some funny features by the Flemish standard, borrowed from the local dialect - although some people will end up instead speaking basically the local dialect with funny Flemish features by the local standard. That wouldn't really be a pidgin or creole (with the associated sense of a partly stripped-down language), just a mismatched dialect, and if a lot of Flemings moved there this mismatched dialect might influence the local dialect. When described like that it sounds pretty similar to the formation of 'standard' languages, to me, which are also made up from disparate dialects with usually a particular dialect dominating.
Of course for Norman-Anglosaxon that distance is clearer, so it makes more sense to think of a hypothetical intermediate as a creole.
Okay I'll stop
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
The weren't. As late as the 1000s a Norse grammarian could assert in writing that Anglo-Saxons and the Norse spoke the same language. I've read and listened to samples of both contemporary languages and disagree with that assessment, but I don't think it's a crazy one - I can see how one might think so if one squinted sideways and handwaved away a lot of details.
The technical term you are missing is "dialect leveling" - dialects in contact sometimes exchange features and become less divergent. The line between dialect leveling and contact-language formation can get pretty blurry. If you want to dig into this, read about koineization.
I'm not willing to describe what happened in the Danelaw as "dialect leveling" because, unlike that Norse grammarian, I think Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse had already diverged too much to be described as dialects of the same language by 870. If you'd asked me about early Anglo-Saxon and Proto-Norse (before 700) I might give a different answer, but the transition from Proto-Norse to Old Norse was very large and disruptive - so much so that there was more difference between those two languages than between Old Norse and Modern Icelandic. Anglo-Saxon remained more conservative.
Speaking of Modern Icelandic...
What's going on with Iceland at this point? Have the British withdrawn allowing for the Danes to return? Not sure if Sveinn Björnsson would have been elected Regent, the TL has changed quite a bit from OTL by 15 May 1941, but I'm not sure that it would be enough for the Icelanders to expect that Denmark would be free in 7 months.
I'd still expect the Icelanders to vote for independence, but I'm not sure they end up in the Entente. Given the riots when the Althing voted to join NATO, I just don't know. Without the experience of being occupied with the Americans, they might actually become closer to them than the British.
Greenland, OTOH, probably hasn't had enough time away from Denmark to leave the Danish orbit the way that it did iOTL.
What's going on with Iceland at this point? Have the British withdrawn allowing for the Danes to return? Not sure if Sveinn Björnsson would have been elected Regent, the TL has changed quite a bit from OTL by 15 May 1941, but I'm not sure that it would be enough for the Icelanders to expect that Denmark would be free in 7 months.
I'd still expect the Icelanders to vote for independence, but I'm not sure they end up in the Entente. Given the riots when the Althing voted to join NATO, I just don't know. Without the experience of being occupied with the Americans, they might actually become closer to them than the British.
Greenland, OTOH, probably hasn't had enough time away from Denmark to leave the Danish orbit the way that it did iOTL.
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
I'm American, I've visited Iceland and I think they are closer to us than the British. The Cod Wars are still part of folk memory there.
I did some digging, and it seems that while WWII-era Icelanders resented some of their marriageable females consorting with soldiers that resentment never focused particularly on any one of the three countries that sent troops there. Nor did violence between the troops and the locals ever get worse than an occasional bar brawl. So I'm a little curious what you're thinking of.
So far no changes - I've taken the attitude that the switch-over in OTL was largely about the US troops being available and the British having better things to do. Here, there aren't going to be any US troops and Denmark is under occupation so doesn't have the troops to do it. That said, with France and northern Norway in Entente hands the threat to Iceland is much smaller and the defending forces will be even smaller than OTL to match. Figure a brigade or so of infantry covering the area around Reykjavik, plus maybe the same again in support troops. As soon as the war's over they'll just be packing up and going home.
I'm surprised that the Hungarian 2nd army isn't making a mad dash for Graz and then to the border to link up with Italy. The Italians and the Poles are their best bet for getting support in the postwar negotiations. Mussolini could also potentially move their forces from Romania via Hungary, couldn't he?
iOTL, the troops went British Invasion Marines then British Army, then Canadian Army and then as of 28 April 1941 British Garrison Forces which were replaced as of 7 uly 1941 with Neutral American troops. The question is whether the Canadians have their turn as iOTL...
The history with some of the information before the takeover by the US is at
And https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.694.2410&rep=rep1&type=pdf"RELATIONS BETWEEN ALLIED FORCES AND THE POPULATION OF ICELAND 1940–2006 " has a *lot* of information.
Even at the minimum number of troops on Iceland iOTL, there were a number of issues. With the Americans never having stationed troops, the Icelanders might look to the US after the end of the war.
Wasn't Iceland due to make a major renegociation with Danemark in 1944 regarding it's association with the Danish crown ? OTL, Danemark was still occupied by Nazi Germany, but here, they are free to do so. You might still get some sort of agreement and not total independance.
Eric S. Raymond
Banned
Very interesting. None of the sources I found described so much friction and low-level violence between troops and the locals. Not that it was a lot in absolute terms - fewer than three murders a year and just one confirmed rape in the timeline if I'm reading correctly - but with the Icelandic population as low as it was that was bound to leave a mark.
Poor Icelanders. When large numbers of strapping young men from elsewhere materialize adjacent to a population that is small, isolated, and somewhat inbred, it is pretty predictable that the local girls are going to go nuts for them. The worst-case situation for that is when histocompatibility between the two populations is high so they smell right to each other, and that would have been exactly so here. No wonder Icelandic males were hostile - they had every reason to be. It's a wonder there wasn't far more violence.
Surely it's a given that a garrison of troops, foreign or otherwise, are going to piss off local men when it comes to women.