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> it's a creole …is it? It's an example of heavy language contact in a few places, but “creole” seems hyperbolic at best.
by TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
> it's a creole
…is it? It's an example of heavy language contact in a few places, but “creole” seems hyperbolic at best.
- kbenson 9y agoWell, there's quite a bit of German and Latin together. Doesn't that qualify?
- Jtsummers 9y agoThe better case for modern English as a creole is through Middle English, when Old English met Norman French following the Norman conquest of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
- aap_ 9y agoNo, it's still Germanic. It just got a lot of loan words.
- kafkaesq 9y agoA very high proportion of loan words, along with significant differences in grammar, phonetics and orthography. That's why people think of it as more of creole (or hybrid) language.
- aap_ 9y agoNone of these are reasons one should consider it a creole language. It may have been influenced by other languages, but that doesn't make it a creole.
- kafkaesq 9y agoYou can go find a linguist to debate this if you want. My basic points are simply: (1) the author of the original article wasn't making much of a point, and (2) in regard to what you were saying, where exactly English sits on the spectrum of hybrid languages is a multi-faceted issue -- rather more complex issue than simply the proportion of loan words.
- kafkaesq 9y agoI'm not going to get into the fine-grained (and for the purpose of this discussion, basically persnickety) nuances of where English sits on the creole/pidgin/hybrid spectrum (especially since none of these terms have formal† definitions anyway). Being as the basic facts of its lineage (a near head-on collision of German and French -- not just "contact in a few places"), and the fact that many of its annoyances (particular in regard to spelling and pronunciation) result directly from a watering-down of these two systems, are generally understood. † Yes, there are widely accepted definitions for these terms, but they are more like conventions ("thought to arise from interactions between parents and children") rather than formal definitions, like e.g. SVO.
- wareya 9y agoCreole is a scientific term, not a casual one. Creoles evolve from pidgins. English was never a pidgin, and it has a very clear history. No useful interpretation of the word "creole", formally defined or not, is broad enough to actually consider English to be a creole, and no good linguist will call it one. Whoever or whatever taught you that it can be considered one, it's wrong. The people who take the Middle English creole hypothesis seriously are crackpots.
- kafkaesq 9y agoI don't think you're precisely correct in all of what you're saying, above. But that's precisely the point I was trying to get across: for the purpose of this discussion, such distinctions are basically persnickety. And in terms of relevance to the original article under discussion, basically neither here nor there.
- hchasestevens 9y agoIn terms of morphological complexity, at least, it falls closer to creoles than any other major European language: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/26/paper1657.pdf http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/26/paper1657.pdf (see page 74).
- mpweiher 9y agoThat was certainly the position of my linguistics department at TU Berlin, influenced largely by Professor C.J. Bailey. Very much an out-of-the-box thinker, but ("but?") very smart and usually (always?) right.