PC: In a failed Norman Conquest, would an influx of continental Germans make English "Anglish"?
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Otto Kretschmer
Banned
I do not know. Most likely they were lost after the Arab conquests - the conquered populations learned the langauge imperfectly and got rid of more complex and cumbersome features
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Compared with English, we had the Wessex period with four cases around 1300. The Danelaw period mixing Swedish and Low Saxon 1350-1500, during which the spoken language mostly went to the current two-case system. The Swedish Great Vowel Shift was also in that Danelaw period. The Bible of 1541 was archaising and still used the four cases, but is said to have frequently mixed dative and accusative in the same positions, so those forms were no longer stable. It was used until 1916. The Norman period came in the 1500s, when the State imposed its chancellery language and the Bible all over the country, and many High German and Latin words entered the language. Use of dative is sporadic, and nominative is melded with accusative, in the writings of the 1600s.
The three genders were kept in speech, but not in writing, and so were officially abolished in the 1800s, although some still use them today.
See here for a brief overview:
Germans in South Africa - Wikipedia
Why, did most colonies experience such settlement of close related but different languages during a period when there was less imposition of a standard dialect?
1) Yes, though in a small number they left traces.
2) Roughly speaking, quite.
This doesn't seem to be more mixed than the situation you would find in many other colonies or medieval settlements, English colonies had German settlers too.See here for a brief overview:
Germans in South Africa - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Like I just said the Ostsiedlung, the Occitan expansion into Eastern Iberia, the Gallo-Italic and Occitan expansion into Italy.
Further examples include Koine Greek, the expansion of Latin over Italic languages and ultimately while we cannot verify it's very probable that Indo-European Europe had countless cases of population speaking similar languages/dialects mixing with each other, to pretend that it only happened in Viking England is non-sense.
I'm pretty sure you can find dozens of examples of "settlement of close related but different languages" throughout the world given that related groups obviously would have tended to live closer to each other and yet not all languages became analytical.
Of course it depends. 'Diglossia' captures only a portion of the nuanced sociolinguistic continuum of Arabic uses. Many people actually speak Educated Spoken Arabic(s), that is, the national vernacular heavily influenced by the standard language, but without declensions.
You could argue that 'Arabic' (the language with declensional endings) is actually a different language from the 'Neo-Arabics' spoken today, except that most Arabs do not feel very much that way, and both varieties very much coexist within the same speech communities (and have likely done so for over a millennium).
Otto Kretschmer
Banned
Those nominal declensions were never that important to begin with. Arabic only had 3 cases distinguished by a vowel change at the end of the world and they were prone to erosion, most Semitic languages lost them. Hebrew of 1000 BC already does not have them.
This is Kees Versteegh's theory, backed up by the testimony of Arab grammarians.
However, we have now sufficient inscriptional evidence to advance an alternative and more complex hypothesis: different Arabic varieties lost declension gradually at different times, both before and slightly after the Conquests. It seems, for example, that the spoken language of Mecca at the time of Muhammad had already lost many case distinctions (but not all of them yet) while, of course, a poetic register with full declension was known (and possibly reflected the spoken language of the nomads of Ma'add, that is, Central Arabia; but this is not proven).
Which is why all Semitic languages ended up losing them. In Arabic, they are highly redundant, because Arabic a written language was codified and 'frozen' just exactly when it was in the process of readapting the system to do without endings. In Akkadian, by contrast, case distinctions were fairly significant.
Also, there's evidence that in Phoenician, which is very closely related to Hebrew, parts of the case system persisted after 1000 BCE (evidence for Hebrew, as I understand it, is messier).
It should have been pretty clear that I'm not pretending that.
Just what do you think my argument is?
Your argument is that English became more analytical(loss of grammatical gender and cases) because of Norse settlement.
Then why are you claiming I'm pretending that it only happened in Viking settled England?
Because if it was the Norse(which were at most 10% of the English populaiton at their peak) the main reason why English became an analytic language then many more languages should have become analytic, from Catalan(contact between Occitan and Ibero-Romance), to Sicilian(contact between Southern Italian dialects and Gallo-Italic/Occitan) to East German dialects(mixture of German and Dutch varieties) or virtually any language that had in the previous millennium had any sizeable contact with a related language.
Pretty much all those areas were dialect continuums where only later have we constructed borders and then standardised the differences. They also don't show the ingress settlement.
I also mention Afrikaans as another language that underwent similar development due to that ingress pattern.
So your post still doesn't explain how I'm supposedly pretending it only happened to England when I've not only mentioned other languages with similar development but also not claimed the development was unique to the contact of Old Norse with Old English.
Norse was like just 2-3 centuries removed from Anglo-Saxon and there was continued contact between the 2 groups, at this point you are simply slightly twisting your argument to arbitrarily exclude other cases when for all intents and purposed they DO fit what you described before with " related but different languages".
Why would the existence of a dialect continuum matter? For all intenses and purposes the existence of Tuscan or Central Italian dialects is irrelevant when talking about DIRECT Occitan and Gallo-Italic settlements in Southern Italy, as is the Catalanization of Valencia and its Mozarabic population.
What do you mean?
If it was not unique then where are all the other analytic languages beyond Afrikaans? Surely you can present more cases than just those 2 given the criteria makes it very easy(just have a language expand over neighboring related ones, like Latin taking over Italy, Attic Greek expanding over other varities and so on)
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Because I'm not claiming the changes are the result of just contact alone. That's why I was specific. That's why I'm annoyed my argument is being twisted to say something else.
I.e. not replacement settlement or settlement apart from the local political structures.
Thus a situation like the Danelaw.
You do know what unique means right?
There being at least 2 examples violates that definition. However, pedantry aside, I'm not claiming complete loss of conjugation etc is always the result of a Danelaw situation, merely the reduction of conjugation.
Well it's clearly not the main factor when looking at what happened to Dutch, Frisian, Scandinavian Languages or even Low Saxon/German or other German dialects, all of which either lost the cases completely or most of them(Low German and some Scandinavian dialects has 2 cases and most other German dialects just 3), compared to proto-Germanic that had 6 cases and Old English which had 4(with one that died just before), Old Norse which also had 4.
Gender-wise, Standard Dutch(and northern/central dialects), Frisian languages and standard Danish and standard Swedish have 2 genders, most Swedish and Norwegian dialects(+insular ones) have 3 genders but West Jutlandic also lost grammatical gender AND cases like English and seem to have happened quite early as well AFAIK.
In view of how heterogenous Scandinavia and the Netherlands/North Germany are on this front I have to contest the theory of Norse influence also on grounds that IF Norse-English contact was the primary cause then we should have seen a more heterogeneous pattern of simplification of cases and gender which I don't think it's really the case, from what I understand a lot of the phonological changes spread south-to-north so the idea that the collapse of gender and cases was caused by a spread north-eastern dialects simplifed by contact of Norse is even weaker(though I find people claiming the exact opposite, so I guess this argument might be disregarded).
Another possibly relevant data point is the fact that grammatical gender re-emerged in Shetlandic(similar Norse/English mix situation) without it being necessarily mostly descendant from local Norse dialects.
The Norse situation involved a religious barrier between the community and a lot of violence(expulsions and massacres), using this logic most of the cases I mentioned fit this definition even better.
Well it is frankly an unnecessary explanation, the loss of cases is an almost universal tendency in Indo-European languages, especially when accounting for newly formed cases(like in Romanian, Baltic and some Indo-Aryan languages AFAIK).
We already can see that Old English and Old Norse were losing cases compared to Proto-Germanic, we know that outside of isolated/small branches like Icelandic, Elfadlian and Faroes most languages lost either all cases or remained with just 2(Low German, Norwegian dialects) and we know that many Dutch and Danish dialects lost the masculine/feminine distiction and that one dialect area(Jutlandic) resembles Middle/modern English. There is virtually no reason to invoke Norse-English contact as the primary or main reason.
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Seems to me that you've already decided and nothing I can say will change your mind on your opinion that the late Old English phonological changes are not due to Old Norse influence and were bound to happen regardless of any language influence.
Ironic considering I was the only one to bother to present actual arguments for my opinion while you merely kept twisting your argument to be a perfect fit for only the Afrikaans and English situation, as if that actually proved anything.