20. Is English a creole?
Description
This article is from the sci.lang FAQ, by Michael Covington (mcovingt@ai.uga.edu) and Mark Rosenfelder (markrose@zompist.com) with numerous contributions by others.
20. Is English a creole?
[--markrose]
The change from Anglo-Saxon to Modern English (loss of gender and of
case inflection, phonological change, acquisition of a huge stock of French
and Latin vocabulary) is certainly dramatic, and has led some sci.lang
posters, and even some linguists (e.g. Domingue, Bailey & Maroldt,
Milroy) to the provocative suggestion that English suffered pidginization
or creolization at the time of the Norman Conquest (1066) or the Norse
invasions (from 865), or both.
This hypothesis, as Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman have
shown in LANGUAGE CONTACT, CREOLIZATION, AND GENETIC LINGUISTICS (1988),
rests on an incomplete understanding of creolization and a shaky grasp on
the history of English. There is a wide range of language contact
situations, from casual contact to deep structural interference; English is
by no means the most striking of these cases. It looks like a creole only
if one ignores this range of phenomena and labels any case of moderate
interference as creolization.
For many of the changes in question, the chronology does not work out.
For instance, the reduction of unstressed vowels to /@/, largely responsible
for the loss of Old English nominal declensions, had taken place *before*
the Conquest, and affected all of England, including areas never settled
by the Norse. And English did absorb an immense amount of French and
Latin vocabulary, but most of this occurred well *after* the Conquest--
past 1450, two centuries after the nobility ceased to be French-speaking.
Other points to note: 1) most of the simplifications and foreign borrowings
seen in English occurred as well in other Germanic languages, notably
Dutch, Low German, and the Scandinavian languages; 2) a particularly
striking borrowing from Norse, the pronoun 'they', was probably adopted
to avoid what otherwise would have been a merge of 'he/him' with 'they/them';
3) the total number of French-speaking invaders was not more than
50,000, compared to an English-speaking population of over 1.5 million--
nowhere near the proportions that would threaten the normal inheritance
of English.
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