And it’s not even slightly sorryEnglish - the language which drags other languages into back alleys & mugs them for useful vocabulary
And it’s not even slightly sorryEnglish - the language which drags other languages into back alleys & mugs them for useful vocabulary
And occasionally it will slip other languages a bit of vocabulary when they're not looking - 'Le weekend' anyone.And it’s not even slightly sorry
Original popular version of thatEnglish - the language which drags other languages into back alleys & mugs them for useful vocabulary
Back in 1990, I made this comment:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Reminds me of one of the funniest exchanges between Del Boy and 'Dave'And occasionally it will slip other languages a bit of vocabulary when they're not looking - 'Le weekend' anyone.
What you refer to as very clear (that there's any creolization in English) is by my reading a very disputed idea.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.
What you refer to as very clear (that there's any creolization in English) is by my reading a very disputed idea.
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.
I think a key topic is also - were old Norse and Anglo-Saxon that different?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.
I think a key topic is also - were old Norse and Anglo-Saxon that different?
Without the experience of being occupied with the Americans, they might actually become closer to them than the British.
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.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.
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.
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.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.
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.