PC: In a failed Norman Conquest, would an influx of continental Germans make English "Anglish"?

Why did it survive in Icelandic?
The Scandinavian standards were created in an effort to separate them from Danish.

Swedish separated in a modernising and simplifying way, but had no phonetic reason to discard cases. We still use case forms in some words, where they are frozen with a different meaning. We might still have used a three-case or four-case system, if the dominant faction of society had wanted that.

Icelandic went in another direction. Someone wrote recently, perhaps on this forum, that it was the early modern Danes who wanted Icelandic to be archaic and classical, something to be proud of, so they standardised it to be closer to the mediaeval language.

Both these languages have kept some vowel distinctions in the unstressed endings, unlike (I think) Danish and Bokmål-Norwegian. And then some Swedish people invent even more distinctions by pronouncing as it is written.
 
The Scandinavian standards were created in an effort to separate them from Danish.

Swedish separated in a modernising and simplifying way, but had no phonetic reason to discard cases. We still use case forms in some words, where they are frozen with a different meaning. We might still have used a three-case or four-case system, if the dominant faction of society had wanted that.

Icelandic went in another direction. Someone wrote recently, perhaps on this forum, that it was the early modern Danes who wanted Icelandic to be archaic and classical, something to be proud of, so they standardised it to be closer to the mediaeval language.

Both these languages have kept some vowel distinctions in the unstressed endings, unlike (I think) Danish and Bokmål-Norwegian. And then some Swedish people invent even more distinctions by pronouncing as it is written.
Most of Sweden don't seem to have had dialects with cases in the last 170-ish years :
main-qimg-3d7316fd19e512bea89a93f0cda465e2
 
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We might still have used a three-case or four-case system, if the dominant faction of society had wanted that.
I think you are over-emphasizing the role of standard languages, the case of Dutch shows how trying to keep cases for centuries failed, same goes with Bokmal allowing 3 genders(influence by Norwegian dialects and Nynorsk)
 
I think you are over-emphasizing the role of standard languages, the case of Dutch shows how trying to keep cases for centuries failed, same goes with Bokmal allowing 3 genders(influence by Norwegian dialects and Nynorsk)
I live in Sweden. The standard language is totally and completely dominant around here, killing all regionalisms, although it has sometimes developed in a more folkish direction, such as the recent usage of back sj instead of the elite's front sj.

Failures and successes are only singular events and not the whole truth. If things had been done in another way, the result might have been different.
Most of Sweden don't seem to have had dialects with cases in the last 170-ish years :
main-qimg-3d7316fd19e512bea89a93f0cda465e2

In 1850 people hade been exposed to the standard for three hundred years. As I mentioned above, there were lots of mixing between dative and accusative in the early modern period, and in the standard, they are fully merged as one. In the pronouns we separate them from the nominative, so it might not be that big a step to have nominative and accusative for the nouns and adjectives, although the mediaeval nominal system looks so inconsistent that it might not be feasible.
 
I live in Sweden. The standard language is totally and completely dominant around here, killing all regionalisms, although it has sometimes developed in a more folkish direction, such as the recent usage of back sj instead of the elite's front sj.

Failures and successes are only singular events and not the whole truth. If things had been done in another way, the result might have been different.


In 1850 people hade been exposed to the standard for three hundred years. As I mentioned above, there were lots of mixing between dative and accusative in the early modern period, and in the standard, they are fully merged as one. In the pronouns we separate them from the nominative, so it might not be that big a step to have nominative and accusative for the nouns and adjectives, although the mediaeval nominal system looks so inconsistent that it might not be feasible.
I strongly contest the idea that there was strong dialect levelling before the 19th century before mass schooling.
Also from what I've seen most of Swedes already spoke varieties of Swedish that has just 2 cases in the 16th century(like you said) so how could you even push for archaic features that were pretty much gone?
We know Dutch failed and we know that Icelandic dialects were conservative without any real effort needed on the part of the people that created the standard language.
To me it seems that outside marginal dialects declining with their idiosyncracies(West Jutlandic, Elfdalian, Low German) the general trend has been that the standard languages don't differ that much from the trends associate with their respective dialectal areas, at least here.

Keeping remnants of the case system in pronouns seems quite normal to me.
 
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The Scandinavian standards were created in an effort to separate them from Danish.

Swedish separated in a modernising and simplifying way, but had no phonetic reason to discard cases. We still use case forms in some words, where they are frozen with a different meaning. We might still have used a three-case or four-case system, if the dominant faction of society had wanted that.

Icelandic went in another direction. Someone wrote recently, perhaps on this forum, that it was the early modern Danes who wanted Icelandic to be archaic and classical, something to be proud of, so they standardised it to be closer to the mediaeval language.

It’s slightly different than my argument, which was more the other way around. Because Iceland was isolated when the first standardization happened in the 16th century, the later Danish government saw it as pure and less affected by German, Dutch and French influence and worked active to keep standard Danish influence out of the Icelandic language.
 
I've been kicking this idea for a long time. I might eventually get around to making this into a TL although it's sort of been done before. Basically the premise is if I had no knowledge of what Middle or Modern English sounded like, but knew Old English, Dutch, Frisian, and the other Germanic languages, what might we guess *English would be like?

Other posters touched on grammar, but I will mention vocabulary. One measure of how similar languages are is called lexical similarity, which typically uses something called the Swadesh list. The Swadesh list contains about 200 words that are very common across languages. Lexical similarity is calculated by dividing the number of similar words by 200 (see page 107 in this book). Now for all other Germanic languages, lexical similarity is generally pretty highly correlated with geographic distance. No big surprise that Dutch, Frisian and German are all quite similar. The same can be said for Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian (Riksmal). And Icelandic and Faroese are unsurprisingly big outliers. Using this same formula, you'd expect English a priori would be pretty similar to Dutch and Frisian considering the short geographic distance involved. But it isn't. In fact, English is no more similar to Frisian than it is to other Germanic languages and only slightly closer to Dutch than to the other Germanic languages.

One of the things that makes English weird is that even its basic vocabulary is different from other Germanic languages. Some of this can be accounted for by the Norman Conquest, which includes words like forest and animal. But there's also a lot of stuff that just can't be accounted for. Take the words bird and dog. Nearly every other Germanic language retains the proto-Germanic terms, which are cognates of the English words fowl and hound. Old English used the perfectly normal fugol and hund. However, these terms underwent a semantic shift during the Middle English period. It's not even clear where the words bird and dog came from, as they have no cognates in any Germanic, Celtic, or Romance language. English is just different for no good reason.

Now without the Norman Conquest disrupting things so much in England, maybe we would still call birds fowl and dogs hounds. If we were conlangers in an alternate universe who had no knowledge of Middle or Modern English, we probably wouldn't end up with a language that sounded like English. *English would likely be more similar to Old English than it is now (but not exactly the same!). There are also other things about English that seem improbable to me, like the survival of the "th" sounds, which died out in all other Germanic languages except Icelandic (though Celtic Welsh has it, which may have helped its preservation). Even many English dialects have dropped it. So it's entirely plausible to postulate the loss of that phoneme in *English judging by the fact it was lost everywhere else in Germanic Europe except in isolated Iceland.

I won't wade into the debate about the loss of the case system, but if it were me, I'd assume that *English also would lose its cases since Dutch and Frisian also lost them and the case system was preserved only in the northwest (Icelandic/Faroese) and southeast (German) of Germanic Europe. That said, there's a fair chance of cases being retained in Scotland, due to its proximity to the Faroe Islands (especially if a Norn-like language develops there).

Even with butterflies alone, English might end up sounding very different. Consider this real-life example of a highly divergent dialect of English. I certainly can't understand it without a translation, even if I can pick out a few words here and there.
 
Not to poo-poo your post, since I'm generally of a similar mind to your conclusions in the broad sense, but a couple of points stuck out to me and had to respond:
I've been kicking this idea for a long time. I might eventually get around to making this into a TL although it's sort of been done before. Basically the premise is if I had no knowledge of what Middle or Modern English sounded like, but knew Old English, Dutch, Frisian, and the other Germanic languages, what might we guess *English would be like?
Fair enough; I've poured through that page before and find it an interesting and reasonable linguistic what-if (I disagree with several of the conclusions and developments therein, but I could chalk that to differences of opinion on linguistic implications), though the world-building around it makes me cringe.
SNIP...Using this same formula, you'd expect English a priori would be pretty similar to Dutch and Frisian considering the short geographic distance involved. But it isn't. In fact, English is no more similar to Frisian than it is to other Germanic languages and only slightly closer to Dutch than to the other Germanic languages.
Well if one were to trace back to Old Frisian, the similarities to Old English become much more apparent (my below point notwithstanding). The fact that Frisia ended up under East Francian and Burgundian/Dutch hegemony I feel leaned on word retention choices, semantics, constructions, etc. at the expense of erstwhile native Ingvaeonic words and patterns.
One of the things that makes English weird is that even its basic vocabulary is different from other Germanic languages. Some of this can be accounted for by the Norman Conquest, which includes words like forest and animal. But there's also a lot of stuff that just can't be accounted for. Take the words bird and dog. Nearly every other Germanic language retains the proto-Germanic terms, which are cognates of the English words fowl and hound. Old English used the perfectly normal fugol and hund. However, these terms underwent a semantic shift during the Middle English period. It's not even clear where the words bird and dog came from, as they have no cognates in any Germanic, Celtic, or Romance language. English is just different for no good reason.
Emphasis mine, this works the other way with Continental Germanic too, though: "Krieg" has no known cognate or derivative beyond recent direct loanwords in English or the North Germanic languages (and is most commonly used specifically in German). And the Scandinavian languages have their "odd" way of forming conjunctions (*auk vice *andi), ditto with the many archaisms of Gothic. My point isn't to gainsay or contest your statement, but to assert that the notion of English being somehow inherently the black sheep of Germanic is, if not outright wrong, at least often overwrought.

EDIT: Regarding semantic narrowing, that's such a subjective and fickle development that, barring personal choice in conlang crafting (which is legit, don't get me wrong), I can't agree using as some sort of hard-deterministic factor on how a language would otherwise evolve under different circumstances. It could be argued that it's a matter of enough post-Hastings scribes, upon re-introducing English in wider literature, having a shared or consented 'norm' within that specific OTL geographic/historical context which led to those words being changed bit by bit in meaning.
Now without the Norman Conquest disrupting things so much in England, maybe we would still call birds fowl and dogs hounds. If we were conlangers in an alternate universe who had no knowledge of Middle or Modern English, we probably wouldn't end up with a language that sounded like English. *English would likely be more similar to Old English than it is now (but not exactly the same!). There are also other things about English that seem improbable to me, like the survival of the "th" sounds, which died out in all other Germanic languages except Icelandic (though Celtic Welsh has it, which may have helped its preservation). Even many English dialects have dropped it. So it's entirely plausible to postulate the loss of that phoneme in *English judging by the fact it was lost everywhere else in Germanic Europe except in isolated Iceland.
Sure, it's a fun notion, but it really depends on the POD (post-rise of Wessex, I can't see th-stopping not being ridiculed and/or proscribed with enough of a literary standard established) and follow-on effects to work in "TH" retention's case. It's not just Welsh that reinforced it, the Norse also heavily used that phoneme (and arguably still does in Elfdalian and Icelandic; even if the former treats it as an allophone of "d", a form of the phoneme still remains). And that's leaving aside the emergence of dental fricatives as 'normal' phonemes in European Spanish, Emiliano-Romagnol, Sardinian, etc. I'd argue a dynamic of 'core European' vice 'peripheral European' areal features working for or against this sound.

Still, I might be wearing my pro-fricative bias, as well as my wont to retain every consonant in OE in a given AH language scenario (as an aside, English is diminished without velar fricatives, fight me :p). YMMV. I could see an English-derived offshoot or non-British national variety normalizing stopping or fronting dental fricatives, a la Dutch>Afrikaans consonant cluster simplifications in OTL.
SNIP

Even with butterflies alone, English might end up sounding very different. Consider this real-life example of a highly divergent dialect of English. I certainly can't understand it without a translation, even if I can pick out a few words here and there.
I wouldn't characterize Yola as a dialect, it seems divergent enough in enough language attributes to warrant being a separate language entirely (a la Scots, which I also don't consider an English dialect since the ~1200s...again, YMMV).
 
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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.

Where?
As in, where can we see that?
As in, can I see the evidence that supports this statement?
As in, can you please provide a link?
 
Where?
As in, where can we see that?
As in, can I see the evidence that supports this statement?
As in, can you please provide a link?
If you are talking about the number of cases in Old English and Old Norse compared to Proto-Germanic that's very basic information, not sure why you are asking me when you can easily search for yourself...
Five cases are reconstructed for Proto-Germanic, with traces of a sixth; these are: nominative, vocative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental.
The noun system of Old English was quite complex with 3 genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and 5 cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental).
The instrumental was rarely used as well.
The upshot of this discussion is that there are four cases in Old Norse: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative.
This compared to 8 cases in Indo-European(that can be reconstructed anyway):
The standard Proto-Indo-European reconstruction counts eight cases
 
If you are talking about the number of cases in Old English and Old Norse compared to Proto-Germanic that's very basic information, not sure why you are asking me when you can easily search for yourself...


The instrumental was rarely used as well.

This compared to 8 cases in Indo-European(that can be reconstructed anyway):

Thank you for your response.

Does the (very interesting) information provided answer my question? Probably not... which is my fault for not making myself clear.

When did the reduction of OE cases take place?
 
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