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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Language relatedness a red herring (was: Sun Langu
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Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 03:22:31 GMT
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In article <32eff989.16197851@news.exodus.net>,
Bill Vaughan <bill@osisoft.com> wrote (in response to 
mark@omnifest.uwm.edu (Mark Hopkins)):

>I agree with your larger point, that language inheritance is not
>tree-shaped but lattice-shaped. English certainly inherits its lexicon
>from several sources, and may have acquired some of its grammar from
>Celtic (the periphrastic tenses are uncannily close to those in Welsh,
>in particular the "progressive" tense, which has no counterpart in
>German nor in French). 

But does in Castilian and Catalan, which clearly must have acquired it
from--well, um, Celtiberian?  I've never before encountred the theory that
the Celtic verbal system influenced the English one.  In fact, according
to my fragmentary recollection of Welsh linguistic history, the
"progressive" shows up first in English.  May I ask for references?

>On top of this, there was surely a period of
>creolization with Norman French, followed by reintegration of the
>creole into English, evidenced by the loss of inflections and
>regularization of irregulars which is typical of creoles.

Such as in the English verbal system, where there are approximately 205
irregular verbs versus Modern German's...215.  Hmm.  So what are some
"irregularities" that post-creole English has jettisoned that its non-
creolised relatives, like Dutch, have retained?  And how many of these
changes (like the widespread loss of inflection) are clearly due to 
"creolisation" under the Norman French and not trends toward simplifi-
cation that began under the Danelaw.  (BTW, any idea how the percentage of
Nordic settlers in England in the ninth century compares to the percentage
of Normans in the 11th?)

I ask these questions because, so far, everyone I've talked to who claims
English went through a period of "creolisation" has been using the term in
a very different way than do the creolists I've read.  Certainly, the
changes English went through in the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Middle
English cannot compare to the complete restructuring that characterises
the formation of Jamaican creole or Tok Pisin.

>There is nothing wrong with talking about linguistic evolution. We
>know languages change -- we have seen it happen. Of course we must
>recognize that simple tree-shaped inheritance diagrams are at best
>misleading at best and at worst utterly invalid.

The tree-model, the wave-model, and the lattice-model all have their
strong and weak points.  Before someone tells me to discard the
tree-model, I'd like to see a lattice model that can be easily reproduced
and understood in two dimensions.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
