Talk:Middle English creole hypothesis

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This article could use a better title, and it reads far too much like an essay. Therefore, I have marked it as needing cleanup. - Furrykef 10:09, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Agree with you that the title stinks. I will have a look at the contents when time permits and see what can be done with what is actually a promising start at a particularly difficult area. Sjc 10:15, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Original Research?

I suspect this article might be based on original research. A Google test only turned up a school paper in a cheating database. That and the personal-essay tone lead me to suspect OR. If we don't find any evidence to the contrary in a couple of days, this article might be a good candidate for a VfD. Szyslak 08:55, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

A clarification: This article doesn't seem to be based on the school paper I found. Szyslak 09:05, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I did some more Google testing and found that there is a "creole hypothesis" that attempts to describe the shift from Old English to Middle English, which means this isn't original research after all. I found the term "creole hypothesis" all over the place, which gave me the idea for this page's new title (the last one was one of the worst titles in the history of Wikipedia). Szyslak 22:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I don't think this article is original research. While there is not much published on the topic it is a lively subject among specialists - people are talking about it. Graemedavis 21:46, 30 August 2007 (UTC) Follow-up - I'm told this idea was around in the 1970s, but did not gain general acceptance. It is now being looked at again. Critics point out that it is possible to have a mixed language which is not a Creole, and that a less contentious approach would be to speak of a Middel English as a mixed language (which may or may not be a creole). I agree with writer above that this area is surprisingly difficult to reference and that google doesn't seem to turn up much, but nonetheless it is an established idea. Graemedavis 22:33, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rewrite

This article needs a top-to-bottom rewrite to eliminate its essayish structure and NPOV problems. It also needs its sources verified. Szyslak 22:45, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Rewrote some POV assertions, but the article still needs much work. Mr. Billion 15:13, 18 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Disappearance of Thou

The use of thou is still a feature of English dialect usage, eg Yorkshire. It is also portrayed as being used by some American religious communities, such as Quakers, or Amish. 193.32.176.177 12:38, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Removed the section on Subject-Verb Inversion in Yes-No Questions

I'm a graduating Linguistics major and this article is an atrocity. I just decided to delete the section on Yes-No questions because the syntactic movement employed in English and French, seen as being a basis for French Influence, is completely unfounded and here's why.

The fact that English and French both invert auxilliaries doesn't prove that French influenced English. Inversion is a common way of creating Yes-No questions in many languages. Those that don't exhibit this property, such as Arabic and Irish Gaelic, have word that is present in such questions (h.al and aN respectively.)

In Universal Grammar, questions have the feature [+Q(uestion)] in the head of the Complementizer Phrase. This must be checked by an element in the specifier of the CP. In Arabic and Irish the words mentioned above fill this purpose. In English and French there are no such words. As a result a syntactic movement, known as T-to-C movement is employed. Whatever is in the Tense Phrase is raised to the CP.

Modern English inverts subjects and auxilliaries in Yes-No questions because it has characteristically weak inflection. As a result of weak inflection, semantically heavy verbs such as 'drive' can't rise from the Verb Phrase to the Tense Phrase and thus can't undergo T-to-C movement. Auxilliaries, which are semantically light, can occupy the TP and thus can experience this movement. Finally, in instances where there is no auxilliary in the Deep Structure form Do-Insertion is employed. The verb do is an expletive("dummy auxilliary") in this usage.

Modern French is characteristically strong and uses a mixture of Subject-Verb and Subject-Auxilliary inversion.

This section was obviously original research. It couldn't make heads or tails of what it was trying to say.

The source for my argument above: Carnie, Andrew. Syntax: A Generative Introduction, 2nd Edition. Padstow (Cornwall): T.J. International Ltd., 2006.


Any chance of having these sections back? It is very hard to comment on them when they have been zapped. I suspect there is a clash of disciplines. The article, what is left of it, seems to be from the discipline of philology, while the criticism is coming from the discipline of transformational generative linguistics. The article does seem to have weaknesses within the format of wikipedia, and has not managed to suggest appropriate references (probably conferences at the moment, as publishing in the area just isn't that quick), but it is not an atrocity, rather a concise summary of one of the most exciting ideas in language study at the moment. Graemedavis 21:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

I've been thiking about this - while I don't think changes in word-order can prove the hypothesis, they may give support to it. I suspect the referencing for this article should be back to basic sources - for example the chapter "Element-Order" in Bruce Mitchell's "Old English Syntax" 1985 gives the concepts needed to understand word-order, and which I imagine have been applied here. Probably someone has looked specifically at word-order in Middle English and its support for the Creole hypothesis, where they have applied ideas from Mitchell and others to a set of data. I don't have the reference, but it would be amazing if there wasn't such an article/articles. Graemedavis 22:42, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Unclear

This sentence "The loss of agreement between modifiers is perhaps attributable to the reduction to schwa." needs more context to understand what it is claiming. Or perhaps it properly belongs to the following paragraph and not as a separate subject at the end of the paragraph it is currently in? Rmhermen 18:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Theory + other aspects

This is a very interesting theory and is in line with some of my thoughts on the subject. However, it should also be remembered that Old English came into frequent contact with two Celtic languages, and Norse, and that these should be taken into consideration too. Norse words are frequent in the north, and are often conflated with Anglo-Saxon ones. There is also some suggestion of Celtic influence on the syntax of English - this would be particularly the case in the north and the west, where people spoke a form of Welsh very late on (up til the modern period in the Welsh marches, and to the 12/1300s in Cumbria) - the Celtic languages have two genders like French. So the creole may be a three/four way one. --MacRusgail 01:42, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Romance and Germanic gender incompatibility

The article says that Middle English may have dropped grammatical gender because the Germanic and Romance systems of gender were and are incompatible. How so? Three-gender German doesn't seem to have any problem assimilating words from two-gender French (le niveau - das Niveau)--Witan (talk) 15:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] List of words at end of article

At the end of the article, there is a list of words borrowed from French, introduced with the following language: "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:" It'd be nice if someone (particularly someone with OED access) checked me on this, but it looks like a lot of these words (e.g. "republic," "executive") didn't come into English until the 16th or 17th century, long after any period that could reasonably be described as the "reign of the Normans." PubliusFL (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)

I checked the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary, and you were correct about both words that you questioned: bellicose, benediction (15th); attorney general, malice aforethought (16th); executive, legislative, republic, court martial, decapitate (17th century). I'm concerned that not only does this article not have any sources, but the arguments seem to be weak (only my opinion). I don't doubt that it's a real theory, it just doesn't seem that the article really backs it up much. Creole's by definition come out of necessity, so I agree with the above poster that you can't use words that came into the language after that need was gone as evidence. There's no doubt that the English language is rich in vocabulary from many different languages, but the arguments don't seem to be very strong here for a creole. Also, shouldn't it be called either Anglo-Norman (as it's called in other articles) or at least Anglo-French? As I'm new and have never edited before, I'll let someone else do that Kman543210 (talk) 09:01, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] References

I've added some references to indicate that far from being original research, this is a well-known area of discussion; many more could be found. On the matter of the list of French borrowings, I can't see that they add anything to the understanding of the issue here - is there a consesus for just deleting them? djnjwd (talk) 23:20, 7 June 2008 (UTC)