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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Anounsing a nu Ingglish spelling
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References: <rharmsen.1857.000106A2@knoware.nl> <32CC4567.BC7@online.no> <E3H0Ky.5A8@midway.uchicago.edu> <32CD1D9C.7E34@online.no>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 19:07:59 GMT
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In article <32CD1D9C.7E34@online.no>, Anders Blehr  <ablehr@online.no> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>
>> Anders Blehr wrote:
>>
>> >I am actually serious.  The English spoken in Newfoundland today is
>> >supposedly as close as you get to 17th century (rural) English anywhere
>> >in the world.
[snip]
>> 
>>         I hadn't actually heard this hypothesis before, but it's
>> irrelevant.  Strange as it may seem, it does not follow to say that since
>> a dialect is closer to 17th century English than other dialects, it must
>> be closer to Old English than they are.  If a dialect has changed more in
>> the last 300 years than some other dialects, but was extremely
>> conservative up till then, it will be closer to earlier forms of the
>> language than dialects which have survived virtually unchanged since the
>> 17th century but innovated a lot before then.
>
>Sorry, what I meant was that "Newfish" :D supposedly is the *oldest*
>living dialect of English, not necessarily that it was close to Old
>English.  I should reread my posts before posting them...

	Yep.  I think you got closer to the mark in your other post where
you call Newfie "most archaic" or "conservative".  All modern spoken
dialects with a common ancestor are exactly the same age.

>>         Of the modern British dialects, I would suspect that some of those
>> spoken in Scotland, with their undiphthongised vowels and conservative
>> consonantalism, would be closer to earlier models than most Southern
>> English dialects.
>
>Actually, the dialects of Newfoundland are Scottish dialects.

	That depends on whether you're using a geographic definition (by
which dialects spoken in Scotland are Scottish, those spoken in Canada are
Canadian, etc.) or a typological one.  I admit that I was a bit sloppy in
my own usage:  I meant *Lowland* Scottish dialects.  Highland Scots were
almost invariably monolingual Gaelic speakers before the Clearances and
after which they generally learned English according to the southeastern
standard.  It was my impression that the dialects most important in the
formation of Newfie English were Highlands English, not Lallans.

>>                    However, I suspect that the living dialects closest to
>> Old English are not to be found in Britain at all, rather on the North
>> German Plain.  The catastrophic changes responsible for the distinctive-
>> ness of modern English among Germanic dialects (the Great Vowel Shift, the
>> influx of Norman French vocabulary, the complete loss of inflection, etc.)
>> never took place here.
>
>Catastrophic?  

"resulting from or like...a sudden violent change or upheaval".  I'd call
the Norman Invasion catastrophic, not to mention the complete reordering
of the English vowel system.  (These two events do not appear to be
directly related.)

>By the way, High German was partially subjected to the
>Great Vowel Shift, too (long "i" > /ai/; long "u" > /au/), but certainly
>you already know this.  

This was a completely independent sound change, one that begins in
southern Austria in the 12th century (three centuries *before* the Great
Vowel Shift) and one to which not even all dialects of Oberdeutsch have
been subjected.  (It's completely absent in Swiss German, for instance.)
There is a similar shift in Netherlandic (cf. Ne. 'huis', 'hij'; Low Saxon
'hus', 'he'), but when this occurs and whether there could be any possible
connection to the English vowel shifts is beyond my ken.

>And Low German (Dutch and Plattdeutsch) has lost most of its inflection.

	This is true of some dialects and not others.  Obviously, the
ones I had in mind are those with the most conservative morphology.

-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
