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Flying Chaucers (Linguistics)
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Donmillion


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Ishmael wrote:
I wish Dan Crisp were here! I am a poor substitute.

But doing your best ...

All of these passages are Anglo-Saxon, not English.

And yet the original Sentence (2), On siex dagum ..., which shares their grammatical phenomena, was English and not Anglo-Saxon?

English and Anglo-Saxon are related languages so there will be overlap. Nevertheless, even alowing for the substitution of a word like "hands" for "handum", the difference is apparent.

But the difference between "days" and "dagum" wasn't?

If we look at the relationship between Dutch and German, we might discover a rate of general overlap between the two that approximates what we see here for Anglo-Saxon and English, yet that does not make either Dutch or German necessarily ancestral to the other.

True. But we don't have an extensive sequence of documentation showing (let's say) Dutch that has very many features of German, which it gradually loses over a period of a few hundred years. If we did, we might be justified in saying that it looked as though Dutch had developed out of German.

What we have in Britain is, first, Anglo-Saxon written by scholars exposed to spoken English ...

Where is your evidence? Where are the samples of Anglo-Saxon not influenced by English-speakers, to provide the comparison? Where is there any reference to an English language separate from Anglo-Saxon, prior to the 21st Century? (I refer you again to Bede). This is surmise, not even hypothesis.

... and, later, early written English authored by scholars trained in Anglo-Saxon.

Again, where is your evidence? Where are the examples of documents in English not influenced by Anglo-Saxon? Where is there any contemporary reference to this phenomenon? There are early Middle English documents complaining about the dominance of French, and rejoicing in its downfall, but where are there similar documents rejoicing in the overthrow of Anglo-Saxon?

Think what you're proposing here: that speakers of a language that lacked grammatical gender and cases (apart from genitives and with pronouns) expressed themselves, in written form only, over a period of some centuries, in a hybrid language that did retain gender and cases, though in a form much weakened from what their A-S overlords had taught them. At the same time, they used many foreign words like "dryhtin" or "lavord" or "heved" in place of their native terms "Lord", "lord", and "head"; or Anglo-Saxon oddities like "berwen", "forthenken", "be-wreien", "schrenchen", "for-tihten", when (by your account) they had perfectly good native verbs in "preserve", "repent", "reveal", "deceive", "seduce" that they would have used in spoken converse.

Who would understand such a mixed-up jargon? And what happened to the idea that documents ...

... composed of ... a hybrid third language or intermediary stage between [English and Anglo-Saxon] ...

... don't exist?

Eventually, we have English written by writers without direct exposure to Anglo-Saxon but who inherited many of the established spelling and grammatical conventions. Ultimately, as literacy expanded, most of those conventions were dropped to more-accurately reflect the vernacular.

In other words, we have a sequence of documents showing a gradual evolution away from the complex grammar of Anglo-Saxon towards simpler forms, with no evidence of any outside influence other than those of Norse and French (well, and some Latin, as far as vocabulary goes).

We might imagine how writing would appear to evolve were a Dutch aristocracy once the overlords of Germany.

We might. But consider that German and "official" Dutch both have a continuing system of grammatical genders, cases, and case-agreements (though now much reduced in Dutch), whereas in the case of Anglo-Saxon and English, the former had such a system but the latter supposedly lacked it. It's obvious that the linguistic histories would have been very different.

Interestingly, though, spoken Dutch largely abandoned the distinction between masculine and feminine gender in the 1600s, treating both as masculine, though the standard language still recognises three genders, with their grammatical apparatus. If you're looking for a parallel between the development of English and Dutch, there's a model for you: a language that lost an important grammatical function within historical times, but still allowed it to cling on in writing--much longer, I think, than happened in the case of English.

In fact, come to think of it, the Dutch language, like English, can be traced through three stages of written history: Old Dutch (500-1150), Middle Dutch (1150-1500), and Modern Dutch (1500 on). The difference is illustrated by the following sentence:

    (Old Dutch): Irlōsin sal an frithe sēla mīna fan thēn thia ginācont mi, wanda under managon he was mit mi.

    (Middle Dutch): Erlossen sal hi in vrede siele mine van dien die genaken mi, want onder menegen hi was met mi.

    (Modern Dutch): Hij zal mijn ziel in vrede verlossen van degenen die mij te na komen, want onder menigeen was hij met mij.

    (English): He will deliver my soul in peace from those who attack me, because, amongst many, he was with me.


The changes are not as startling as the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Modern English. Notable is the development of the use of pronoun subjects from Old to Middle Dutch (it was unnecessary to say hi, "he", in Old Dutch, because the verb conveyed that on its own). Very notable are the changes in word order from Middle Dutch to Modern Dutch. Note also the change from Old Dutch siele mine (feminine pronoun "mine") to Modern Dutch mijn ziel (masculine pronoun "mijn").

Hmmm ... Must look into this some more. Thanks, Ishmael!
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
I could be wrong but virtually all the AS I have seen is (to my way of thinking) much better undestood as a form of mouth music rather than any simple reflection of a spoken language, its about rhythm and mood, rather than brevity clarity and word order.


Have you tried reading / listening to German? It's about rhythm and mood, rather than brevity, clarity, and word order.

But millions of people use it every day ...
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nemesis8


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That's exactly the point. German is a foreign language to the English.
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nemesis8


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Mouth music and story telling was common to Gaelic and AS communities. I don't think that the AS texts I have seen reflect the spoken language of your honest toilers.

In fact the language changes you are proposing would mean that different generations (not just different folks from different areas) would have great difficulty understanding each other easily during your ME period, despite your valiant efforts to understand this..
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
That's exactly the point. German is a foreign language to the English.

Sorry, Nate, I don't see your point. German isn't a foreign language to Germans. Anglo-Saxon wasn't to Anglo-Saxons.

It seemed as though you were referring to A-S and ME poetry. Ormulum is a long "poem" (at least, it's in verse), so, like you, "I can't imagine anyone speaking on a day to day basis Middle English, say in the style of Orm". On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone speaking on a day-to-day basis in the style of any modern popular novelist, either. That's a mark of the difference between spoken language and written language.

But perhaps it's the language itself that bothers you, not the style? Care to be more explicit about why you can't imagine anyone actually speaking A-S or ME?
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
Mouth music and story telling was common to Gaelic and AS communities. I don't think that the AS texts I have seen reflect the spoken language of your honest toilers.

In fact the language changes you are proposing would mean that different generations (not just different folks from different areas) would have great difficulty understanding each other easily during your ME period, despite your valiant efforts to understand this..

I can't understand a lot of what people 40 years my junior say today. Syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation are all startlingly different.

Are you suggesting that the differences between manuscripts written in, say, 1150, 1250, 1350, and 1450 are illusory? That really they're all the same dialect, same spelling, same vocabulary, same rules of grammar? If so, I suggest you take the trouble to research the matter for yourself, as I have done. You can find Morris' and Skeat's "Specimens of Early English" at http://www.archive.org/details/specimensofearly00morruoft for Part I, and at http://www.archive.org/stream/specimensofearly00morruoft/specimensofearly00morruoft_djvu.txt for Part II. I recommend downloading the (.pdf) files; the alternatives have been generally corrupted to uselessness in the OCR process.

The changes are real, but I think you're exaggerating the problem they'd pose for contemporaries. As I've repeatedly pointed out, the changes can be traced over 600 years, not the 300 that Mick supposed in THOBR.
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Ishmael


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Donmillion wrote:
Anglo-Saxon is no different from Dutch in that respect--in fact, I think less so: I suspect it's easier (for English speakers) to recognise and understand simple Anglo-Saxon sentences than the equivalent Dutch ones. But I have no evidence of that.


My analogy likened the relationship between English and Anglo-Saxon to that between German and Dutch.
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Ishmael


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Donmillion wrote:
And yet the original Sentence (2), On siex daegum ..., which shares their grammatical phenomena, was English and not Anglo-Saxon?


My sense of it was that this was an English sentence with some Anglo-Saxon or Latin word content. After all, is even "datum" (as I suggested) an English word? It gets used in English but then once upon a time there were many more Anglo-Saxon words being used in English as well (at least among the small literate class).

But the difference between "days" and "dagum" wasn't?


That's not what I suggested. There was an English word, used into the 18th century, written as daum that meant "datum". I proposed that dagum was an alternate spelling of daum.

However, I think you are likely right: "daegum" here is an Anglo-Saxon word -- but then "Datum" is a Latin word. Neither would make the sentence itself either Latin or Anglo-Saxon.

True. But we don't have an extensive sequence of documentation showing (let's say) Dutch that has very many features of German, which it gradually loses over a period of a few hundred years. If we did, we might be justified in saying that it looked as though Dutch had developed out of German.


This phenomenon is perfectly consistent with the scenario I have previously outlined and I really couldn't give a monkey's ass whether you think it viable. You are wasting my time and energy.
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Ishmael


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Donmillion wrote:
I can't understand a lot of what people 40 years my junior say today. Syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation are all startlingly different.


If you honestly perceive the world in this fashion. I do not live in your universe. There is no point in this discussion.

I've run into people like you so often. You're exactly the phenomenon I created the original discussion board to escape. You just drag everything down into an unending debate that never goes anywhere. I have work I want to do but I get distracted by this minutiae!

Its not my job to convince you. Work it out for yourself and stop demanding that we prove anything to you. If you think we're wrong, so be it. What's that to me?
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Donmillion


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Ishmael wrote:
Its not my job to convince you. Work it out for yourself and stop demanding that we prove anything to you.

You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, Ishmael. As I said (not in these words) when I joined up, I don't want the AE community to prove anything to me, but to itself. Like all testers, I've had a lot of experience with failed systems, and I can tell you that, in almost every case, software systems fail because they look fine in the "big picture", but neglect important details. Masses and masses of them.

If your (AE) systems can't account for the detail--not individual "minutiae", but the mass of detail, such as Anglo-Saxon-style grammatical gender and case-declensions of nouns and adjectives continuing into quite late Middle English--then they will fail. As a result of my pointing out these inconsistent details ("bugs"), I have seen both you and Mick forced into quite substantial modifications of the original hypothesis, without finding it necessary to abandon it. I think that the argument is made the stronger, not the weaker, by having to (and being able to) explain these "inconvenient" details.

Almost all software developers have the mistaken impression that the tester's job is to "break the software". Unfortunately, many testers have been taught the same. The truth is, the tester's job is to find out where the developers broke the software in the course of creating it. That way, it can be repaired and made stronger.
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Donmillion


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Ishmael wrote:
Donmillion wrote:
I can't understand a lot of what people 40 years my junior say today. Syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation are all startlingly different.


If you honestly perceive the world in this fashion. I do not live in your universe. There is no point in this discussion.

Pity that smilies are forbidden. They make it much more obvious when a joke's being perpetrated. I hope The Powers That Be will permit me this one:

I wrote:
I can't understand a lot of what people 40 years my junior say today. Syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation are all startlingly different. :-)>

Really! Carbon-based life-forms have no sense of fun!
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nemesis8


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Donmillion wrote:

The changes are real, but I think you're exaggerating the problem they'd pose for contemporaries. As I've repeatedly pointed out, the changes can be traced over 600 years, not the 300 that Mick supposed in THOBR.


I dont think so, and despite your wriggling you really need a better answer than this.

Your starting point should be why the so called middle english phase has been, up to now established at the 300 point. This is because orthodoxy beleieves that the Weight of Evidence shows virtually all the changes took place in this time frame. In fact your argument overlooks the straight AS documents that occur within the timeframe of the additional 300 years you are now deviously trying to add on.

So come clean this is interesting. What is the end date for straight AS scripts? How many really old ME scripts are there that would suppport the 600 mark?
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nemesis8


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Donmillion wrote:
[7] And hyrdas waeron on tham ylcan [same] rice waciende and nihtwaeccan healdende ofer heora [their] heorda.
.....And herdsmen were in the same kingdom waking and nightwatch holding over their herds.[/list]

The odd one out was number (4), which is "Middle English"; the others all predate the 11th Century. A couple of vocabulary items and a couple of sequence differences, but otherwise perfectly intelligible even without modernised spelling!

And they (it's always "they") say that Anglo-Saxon is a foreign language ...


Don, I think the last one you have mistranslated it is "And herdsmen were in the same kingdom watching and holding nightwatch over their herds"
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
Donmillion wrote:
[7] And hyrdas waeron on tham ylcan [same] rice waciende and nihtwaeccan healdende ofer heora [their] heorda.
.....And herdsmen were in the same kingdom waking and nightwatch holding over their herds.[/list]...


Don, I think the last one you have mistranslated it is "And herdsmen were in the same kingdom watching and holding nightwatch over their herds"

Tricky question, N8; related verbs, you see:

    wacian wv/i2 to be awake, or active, keep awake, watch
    waeccan wv/t1a to watch, wake [see wacian]

I'm not ignoring your previous, by the way--it's a busy weekend.

I do Banrock Station Mataroa-Shiraz in cardboard casks--a good quaffer ...
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Donmillion


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nemesis8 wrote:
Donmillion wrote:

The changes are real, but I think you're exaggerating the problem they'd pose for contemporaries. As I've repeatedly pointed out, the changes can be traced over 600 years, not the 300 that Mick supposed in THOBR.

Your starting point should be why the so called middle english phase has been, up to now established at the 300 point. This is because orthodoxy beleieves that the Weight of Evidence shows virtually all the changes took place in this time frame. In fact your argument overlooks the straight AS documents that occur within the timeframe of the additional 300 years you are now deviously trying to add on.

So come clean this is interesting. What is the end date for straight AS scripts? How many really old ME scripts are there that would suppport the 600 mark?

No time for a full, evidentially supported answer right now, but a few things mostly from the top of my head, and from an "orthodox" viewpoint--more in the nature of hints, really (see what you come up with in response):

(1) Colloquial Dutch had lost the feminine gender by 1600, as revealed in contemporary and later informal documents. Formally, it remained part of the official language that was standardised in the 15th and 16th centuries (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands; "General Civilized Dutch"), and was still taught in schools as "correct" Dutch in the 1970s--may still be, I don't know. Nobody has used it in speech for centuries, but it hangs on, along with some other archaic but "official" grammar, in formal writing.

(2) The manuscript evidence shows several A-S dialects from very early times, corresponding to geographic areas. Following Alfred's reforms, West Saxon became pretty much a universal standard, taught in all the monastic scriptoria (almost no-one else was doing any writing) up to and past the Norman Conquest. During the Norman period, however, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was about the only document being produced in A-S--at several monastic centres, which exchanged copies. Meanwhile, there's no reason to suppose that the spoken dialects had gone away.

(3) Middle English begins "officially" with the "Second Peterborough Continuation" of the A-S Chron.. A fire in 1116 destroyed Peterborough Abbey's own copy, so the monks created a fresh version from other centres' manuscripts, which took it up to 1120. Those entries are in standard A-S, as are those of the "First Continuation", up to 1131. As far as anyone knows, that was the last A-S written until it became an academic subject in relatively recent times. But the "second continuation", written in a single hand to cover the period from 1132 to 1154, is not in A-S, but early Middle English. Assuming that the Second Continuation reflects the language spoken in the East Midlands at the time, (and that English grew out of Anglo-Saxon!), it's evident that considerable linguistic change must have taken place between the time that A-S was standardised (9th Century) and the 1130's. Here's a sample, from the 1137 entry:

    Þa the suikes undergæton ðat he milde man was and softe and god, and na iustise ne dide, þa diden hi alle wunder.

There are many points of difference from A-S, yet the several hundred words show essentially the same verb system, the same pronouns and particles, continuation of grammatical gender, noun-adjective concordance, a four-case declension system, and relatively little trace of French vocabulary (mostly legal/courtly, as with "justice" in the Peterborough quote above). The word-order, though, was mostly modern. The departures from SVO order, which were a very common feature of A-S, were now much rarer.

(4) There was no standard for ME, so as writing in English spread--initially still within the monasteries--people reverted to writing in their local dialects; linguists call the Middle English period, "the Dialect Age". The dialect areas for Middle English corresponded fairly closely to the AS dialect areas, and features of the AS dialects of 500 years earlier can be traced in the ME dialects.

(5) In the 14th Century, as English began to replace French for official purposes, a legal standard began to emerge in Westminster ("Chancery English"), out of which came the standardised language used and taught at Oxford and Cambridge (and used by Chaucer). The "Middle English" period extends from when there is written evidence of non-A-S English, c. 1130 (1150 in round numbers), to when the standard had become consolidated, c. 1450. That's your 300 years.

(6) Around the same time that the Second Continuation was being written, a number of "Old English Homilies" were being penned. We can't date them with the accuracy of the Peterborough text, but they all pre-date 1150. They show similar features to the Peterborough Chronicle in many respects, though; I quoted one of them the other day (on "Palm Sunday"--the one I haven't worked out the meaning of yet). These texts demonstrate that, if ME was a continuation of A-S, substantial changes had taken place before the emergence of written ME. Question is, how much before?

(7) Here particularly I need to take time I haven't got today for research. I think I remember having written, a couple of months ago, that the Northern dialect of Anglo-Saxon had already effectively lost the use of grammatical gender before the year 1,000. Assuming that that means 900 AD, and rounding up 1450 to 1500 (when of course there were still a lot of "archaic" features even in Standard Modern English--Shakespeare still has some 3rd person plural verbs ending in A-S "-eth") gives us a round 600 years.

There I have to leave it for the moment--but, N8, I'll get back to you.
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