Middle English creole hypothesis
Encyclopedia
The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language
is a creole
, i.e., a language that developed from a pidgin
. The vast differences between Old
and Middle English
have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at the time of either the Norse
or Norman Conquests, or during both.
s from Old English to Middle English. The system of declension
of noun
s was radically simplified and analogized. The verb
system also lost many old patterns of conjugation
. Many strong verb
s were reanalysed as weak verb
s. The subjunctive mood
became much less distinct. Syntax
was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid.
These grammatical simplifications resemble those observed in pidgins, creoles and other contact languages, which arise when speakers of two different languages need to communicate with one another. Such contact languages usually lack the inflection
s of either parent language, or drastically simplify them.
However, many say that English is probably not a creole because it retains a high number (283) of irregular verb
s.
changes, e.g., the collapse of all cases into genitive and common. However, the reduction of unstressed vowel
s to schwa
(i.e., to unpronounced vowels), due to a fixed stress location, contributed to this process, a pattern which is common to many Germanic languages
(although a few, such as dialects of Norwegian
, Icelandic
, and Faroese
, have not undergone this reduction of vowel sounds). The process of case collapse was also already underway in Old English, e.g. in strong masculine nouns, where the nominative and accusative cases had become identical. Thus the simplification of noun declension from Old English to Middle English may have had causes unrelated to creolization, although creolization may have caused the grammatical changes to occur more rapidly.
loanword
s, most of the borrowing happened during the 14th century; the nobility ceased to be French-speaking in 1362. Nevertheless, the Norman Invasion
had still resulted in the loss of many native Anglo-Saxon words. In fact, by the end of the period in which Middle English was spoken, as much as eighty percent of Old English vocabulary was no longer in use. However, the most striking Norse borrowing (their pronoun
s) cannot be attributed to creolisation. It was more likely a result of ambiguity between hiem and him etc.
The most common plural
form in English is cognate with the masculine nominative-accusative plural (Old English -as) and is also cognate
with the Old Saxon plural -os and the Old Norse plural -ar. However, the widespread use of the -s plural may suggest French influence; compare English pluralization to that of German and Dutch (English, Dutch, and German are all categorized by many as West Germanic languages). Although German and Dutch do use the -s plural, it is used much less often than in English; while the use of an -n or -en plural may be viewed as an irregular method of pluralization in English, the opposite is true in Dutch
, and, to a lesser extent, in German
.
There is at least one change that may be a direct result of French influence: the loss of Thou
. Under Norman influence, Thou became parallel with Tu
, but then fell into disuse as it eventually came to be seen as rude. However, a similar process took place across Western Europe
, including in Spain
and Germany
, without such a direct influence.
French influence has affected English pronunciation as well. Whereas Old English had the unvoiced fricative sounds [f], [s], [θ] (as in thin), and [∫] (shin), French influence helped to distinguish their voiced counterparts [v], [z], [ð] (the), and [ʒ] (mirage), and also contributed the diphthong [ɔj] (boy).
The combination of a largely French-speaking aristocracy and a largely English-speaking peasantry gave rise to many pairs of words with a Latinate word in the higher register and a Germanic word in the lower register. For example, the names of farmyard animals tend to be Germanic, from the names the English farmers and herders used:
The names of the animals when they appear on one’s plate, as the Norman French-speaking aristocracy saw them, are of Latin origin:
Other such doublets include:
During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are:
A few words retain the French construction of noun followed by adjective, in contrast to the typical English construction of adjective plus noun:
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
is a creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
, i.e., a language that developed from a pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
. The vast differences between Old
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
and Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at the time of either the Norse
Danelaw
The Danelaw, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle , is a historical name given to the part of England in which the laws of the "Danes" held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. It is contrasted with "West Saxon law" and "Mercian law". The term has been extended by modern historians to...
or Norman Conquests, or during both.
History of the theory
The theory was first proposed in 1977 by C. Bailey and K. Maroldt and has since found both supporters and detractors in the academic world.Differences between Middle and Old English
The argument in favour of calling Middle English a creole comes from the extreme reduction in inflected formInflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
s from Old English to Middle English. The system of declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
of noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s was radically simplified and analogized. The verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
system also lost many old patterns of conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
. Many strong verb
Strong verb
*for the strong inflection in various languages, see strong inflection*for irregular verbs, see irregular verb*for the strong verbs in Germanic languages, see Germanic strong verb...
s were reanalysed as weak verb
Weak verb
Weak verb may refer to:*light verb, or "semantically weak verb", verb participating in complex predication that has little semantic content of its own, but provides through inflection some details on the event semantics, such as aspect, mood, or tense...
s. The subjunctive mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
became much less distinct. Syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
was also simplified somewhat, with word order patterns becoming more rigid.
These grammatical simplifications resemble those observed in pidgins, creoles and other contact languages, which arise when speakers of two different languages need to communicate with one another. Such contact languages usually lack the inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
s of either parent language, or drastically simplify them.
However, many say that English is probably not a creole because it retains a high number (283) of irregular verb
Irregular verb
In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. The idea of an irregular verb is important in second language acquisition, where the verb paradigms of a foreign language are learned...
s.
Causes of grammatical changes
It is certain that Old English underwent grammaticalGrammar
In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
changes, e.g., the collapse of all cases into genitive and common. However, the reduction of unstressed vowel
Vowel
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
s to schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
(i.e., to unpronounced vowels), due to a fixed stress location, contributed to this process, a pattern which is common to many Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
(although a few, such as dialects of Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Icelandic
Icelandic language
Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...
, and Faroese
Faroese language
Faroese , is an Insular Nordic language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 25,000 Faroese people in Denmark and elsewhere...
, have not undergone this reduction of vowel sounds). The process of case collapse was also already underway in Old English, e.g. in strong masculine nouns, where the nominative and accusative cases had become identical. Thus the simplification of noun declension from Old English to Middle English may have had causes unrelated to creolization, although creolization may have caused the grammatical changes to occur more rapidly.
French influences
Although English has numerous French and NormanNorman language
Norman is a Romance language and one of the Oïl languages. Norman can be classified as one of the northern Oïl languages along with Picard and Walloon...
loanword
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
s, most of the borrowing happened during the 14th century; the nobility ceased to be French-speaking in 1362. Nevertheless, the Norman Invasion
Norman conquest of England
The Norman conquest of England began on 28 September 1066 with the invasion of England by William, Duke of Normandy. William became known as William the Conqueror after his victory at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, defeating King Harold II of England...
had still resulted in the loss of many native Anglo-Saxon words. In fact, by the end of the period in which Middle English was spoken, as much as eighty percent of Old English vocabulary was no longer in use. However, the most striking Norse borrowing (their pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s) cannot be attributed to creolisation. It was more likely a result of ambiguity between hiem and him etc.
The most common plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
form in English is cognate with the masculine nominative-accusative plural (Old English -as) and is also cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
with the Old Saxon plural -os and the Old Norse plural -ar. However, the widespread use of the -s plural may suggest French influence; compare English pluralization to that of German and Dutch (English, Dutch, and German are all categorized by many as West Germanic languages). Although German and Dutch do use the -s plural, it is used much less often than in English; while the use of an -n or -en plural may be viewed as an irregular method of pluralization in English, the opposite is true in Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, and, to a lesser extent, in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
There is at least one change that may be a direct result of French influence: the loss of Thou
Thou
The word thou is a second person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in almost all contexts by you. It is used in parts of Northern England and by Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee , and the possessive is thy or thine...
. Under Norman influence, Thou became parallel with Tu
T-V distinction
In sociolinguistics, a T–V distinction is a contrast, within one language, between second-person pronouns that are specialized for varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee....
, but then fell into disuse as it eventually came to be seen as rude. However, a similar process took place across Western Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, including in Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, without such a direct influence.
French influence has affected English pronunciation as well. Whereas Old English had the unvoiced fricative sounds [f], [s], [θ] (as in thin), and [∫] (shin), French influence helped to distinguish their voiced counterparts [v], [z], [ð] (the), and [ʒ] (mirage), and also contributed the diphthong [ɔj] (boy).
The combination of a largely French-speaking aristocracy and a largely English-speaking peasantry gave rise to many pairs of words with a Latinate word in the higher register and a Germanic word in the lower register. For example, the names of farmyard animals tend to be Germanic, from the names the English farmers and herders used:
- chicken/fowl
- calf
- cow
- sheep/lamb
- swine/pig
The names of the animals when they appear on one’s plate, as the Norman French-speaking aristocracy saw them, are of Latin origin:
- poultry
- veal
- beef
- mutton/agnew
- pork
Other such doublets include:
| Latin | Germanic |
|---|---|
| bellicose | warlike |
| benediction | blessing |
| close | shut |
| commence | begin |
| decapitate | behead |
| desire | wish |
| gentle | mild |
| labour | work |
| novel | new |
| verity | truth |
During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are:
- attorney
- bailiff
- baron
- city
- conservative
- countess
- county
- damage
- duchess
- duke
- empire
- executive
- felony
- govern
- judicial
- jury
- justice
- legislative
- liberal
- marriage
- nobility
- parliament
- perjury
- petty
- prince
- prison
- regal
- representative
- republic
- royal
- senator
- sovereign
- state
- traitor
- viscount
A few words retain the French construction of noun followed by adjective, in contrast to the typical English construction of adjective plus noun:
- attorney generalAttorney GeneralIn most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general, or attorney-general, is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions he or she may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement or responsibility for public prosecutions.The term is used to refer to any person...
- court martial
- malice aforethoughtMalice aforethoughtMalice aforethought is the "premeditation" or "predetermination" that was required as an element of some crimes in some jurisdictions, and a unique element for first-degree or aggravated murder in a few.-Legal history:...
External links
- Brandy Ryan, "Middle English as Creole: “Still trying not to refer to you lot as ‘bloody colonials’”", University of Toronto, 2005