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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: english language history 
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References: <Q0mElMA0B8gyEwQk@dial.pipex.com> <32919C86.579A@pi.net> <E1B4IL.HI6@midway.uchicago.edu> <329878DF.7190@pi.net>
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 22:59:47 GMT
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In article <329878DF.7190@pi.net>, Leslie Sitek  <siteklj@pop.pi.net> wrote:
>Daniel von Brighoff wrote:
>> 
>> In article <32919C86.579A@pi.net>, Leslie Sitek  <siteklj@pi.net> wrote:
>> >J.J.Farrell wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [Norman French] certainly became the official
>> >> language of the country, but there can be little doubt but that the
>> >> vast majority of the population spoke the precursors of English
>> >> throughout this period.
>> 
>>         I concur.  The characterisation of English as "a dying language"
>> was considerably far from the mark.  It was really no worse off than
>> Catalan (now the most-spoken "minority" language of Europe) during the
>> Decadencia.
>
>There is still the argument that in the 14th century English practically
>ceased to be a written language following the Norman Conquest when it
>became the language of the country. In schools only French (and Latin)
>was tought (after 1332).

	True enough.  However, this ignores the fact that the vast
majority of the population were illiterate and never attended school.
The were hardly affected by the change in written language.  Furthermore,
Latin was the only official language throughout much of Europe
(the Hungarian parliament used it up until last century) at one time.
This doesn't mean the vernaculars were "dying" or even "threatened".

>In a process af a language dying the beginning of the end is that except
>the ruling class, the lesser gentry adopts the the new language.(*) Then
>the people become bi-lingual, then they begin to drop the language which
>has no commercial value and become eventually monoglot in the new
>language.
>In exactly this way struggle for survival of the English language is
>described (until *) and the death of the Cornish language in "The Story
>of the Cornish Language" by P. Berresford Ellis; ISBN 0-85025-310-1).

	Yes, I'm familiar with it.  Unfortunately, as invaluable a source
as it is for Cornish, it's hardly the best one for the history of the
English language.  The histories of English and Cornish are scarcely
comparable.  To quote again from _The Story of English_:

	The continuity of the English language in the mouths of the mass
	of ordinary people was never in doubt.  Why did English survive?
	Why was it not absorbed into the dominant Norman tongue?  There
	are three reasons.

	First and most obvious:  the pre-Conquest Old English vernacular,
	both written and spoken, was simply too well established...to be
	obliterated.  It is one thing for the written record to become
	Latin and French..., but it would have needed many centuries of
	French rule to eradicate it as the popular speech of ordinary
	people.  The English speakers had an overwhelming demographic
	advantage....

	Second, English survived because almost immediately the Normans
	began to intermarry with those they had conquered....The great
	historian Ordericus Vitalis provides good evidence of the decline
	of French in educated society, both courtly and clerical.  The 
	son of a Norman knight and an English mother, Ordericus was born
	less than a decade after the conquest near Shrewsbury....At the
	age of ten he was sent to...a monastery in Normandy.  There, he
	writes (in Latin, of course), "like Joseph in Egypt, I heard a 
	language which I did not know."  In other words, he knew no
	French.
	
	Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, in 1204...the Anglo-Normans
	loss control of their French territory....Many of the Norman 
	nobility...were forced to declare allegiance either to France or
	England.

By contrast, Cornish had never been a literary language, let alone a
well-established one with a large corpus of high-quality texts (both
original and translated) like English.  Since the Anglo-Saxon
invasions, the Cornish speakers had been greatly outnumbered by their
Germanic neighbors and no later changes--the influx of Norseman, the
Norman conquest--did anything to change this.  As noted before, the
Norsemen soon assimilated to the English-speaking majority.  Why should
the fate of the Normans, who--despite being conquerors--were an even
smaller minority, been any different?

Maybe if England had remained subordinated to a larger, French-speaking
realm (much as Cornwall was subordinate to the English kingdom), the
combination of continued French settlement and the elevated prestige of
the court language might have dealt a greater blow to English (even as it
has to such formerly well-established languages like Occitan).  But this
didn't happen; in fact, England and France were openly hostile to each
other for much of the Middle Ages.  Association with the enemy tends to
dim the prestige of a language.  (Consider, for instance, the fate of
German in the USA since WW1.)

	In short, it takes much more than conquest by a small elite to
change the language of a country.  The Franks couldn't force their 
Germanic language on the Romance-speaking Gauls, nor the Manchus theirs on
the Chinese, nor the Turks theirs on the inhabitants of the Balkans. A
language isn't "dying" simply because it happens not to fulfil all public
functions where it is spoken.  Will Cantonese die out in Hong Kong when
the Mandarin-speaking PRC takes over?  Will Swahili die out in Kenya?
Russian in Kazakhstan?  Spanish in Texas?  I hardly think so.

>John Travista (Cornish speaking Cornishman) from St Melion (wrote a big
>enceclopedia and history, died in 1402) -talking about saving English
>from death- states:
>"John of Cornwall, a grammer master, changed the instruction and
>construing in the grammer schools from French into English: and Richard
>Pencrych learned that kind of teaching from him and other men from
>Pencrych, so that now, in the year of our Lord, 1385, the ninth of the
>second King Richard after the Conquest, in all grammer schools in
>England, children are now dropping French and contruing and learning
>English"

	Nothing in this passage implies or suggests that the author
considers English "near death" or in need of being "saved".

[snip]
>> >a collaege of mine who knows more about this subject sais that we have
>> >to credit the Norman-French for the absence of "cases" like in German
>> >(grammatical changes due to nominative, genitive, etc.).
>> 
>>         Can we also credit it with the absence of case in Dutch, Frisian,
>> Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish?  A more convincing argument is summarised
>> by Prof. Tom Shippey in _The Story of English_ (Viking/Penguin, 1986):
>> 
>>         Consider what happens when somebody who speaks...good Old
>>         English...runs into somebody who speaks good Old Norse.  They can
>>         no doubt communicate with each other, but the complications in
>>         both languages are going to get lost....They understand the main
>>         words.  What they don't understand are the grammatical parts of
>>         the sentence.  For instance, the man speaking good Old English
>>         says for one horse "that hors" but for *two* horses he says "tha
>>         hors".  Now the Old Norse speaker understands the word "horse" all
>>         right, but he's not sure if it means one or two...because his word
>>         for "the" doesn't behave like that....If you get enough situations
>>         like that there is a strong drive towards simplifying the language.
>> 
>A really interesting thought. 
>But in this case it was a struggle between the Saxon (German) and the
>French (Roman) language that were not closely related (in French horse =
>cheval) that resulted into English (cf. English: chevalier).

	Yes, and under these circumstance, one would expect intensive
borrowing of vocabulary but not necessarily any great influence on
inflectional morphology or other aspects of the grammar.  Korean, for
instance, has borrowed as much of its vocabulary from Chinese (which was
the only official written language there until the end of the 19th
century--and practically the only written language there at all until the
15th), but its grammar doesn't seem to be similarly affected.  Although
Classical Chinese has always been isolating and uninflected, Korean is
still agglutinating (i.e. using particles to express grammatical
relationships), like its neighbor (and possible relative) Japanese.

>> >I think Norman-French must have been more than a language just spoken by
>> >the happy few considering the influence it represented on the English
>> >language.
>> 
>> Although it's impossible to give precise figures, the evidence suggests
>> that the Norsemen has a much greater demographic impact on England than
>> the Normans.  Loanwords from the latter are greater in number, but those
>> from the former tend to be much more basic:  "sky", "dirt", "give"--even
>> the pronoun "they".  How many function words (as opposed to common nouns
>> and verbs) have we borrowed from French?
>
>Of the 50 words of the first page of my (English) Dictionary 34 are of
>French origin, two Latin, two Hebrew, two Greek and one of mixed origin;
>the rest (9) is of Saxon/German or Nordic origin.

"function words"--prepostions, conjunctions.  (I was also informally
extending this to include pronouns, basic adverbs, etc.)  Plenty of
languages borrow substanitives and verbs from each other; how many borrow
pronouns?  Look over your list.  What parts of speech are the French
words?  What parts of speech are the Germanic words? 

>It's remarkeble that only a few Celtic words are part of the English
>language considering the fact that Saxon is extinct and Welsh -and the
>related Cornish and Breton- still extists (or extisted) up to our times
>(Britain was all Celtic when the Romans withdrew and the Saxons began to
>invade the country).

	Saxon is *not* extinct; just ask one.  

	Others have remarked on the scarcity of Celtic loans in English.
Few have commented, however, on the lack of Korean or Vietnamese words in
Chinese, Same or Finnish words in Swedish, or Spanish words in Arabic.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
