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Matters Arising (The History of Britain Revealed)

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berniegreen

Mick Harper wrote:

We often deal with this notion of 'two parents' because it is a standard way of 'saving the paradigm' -- essentially melding the old/false with the new/true.

No, I don't think so, Mick. It seems to me that the 'two parent' proposition, as you dub it, represents an altogether different paradigm.

If you can point to a single example of a population adopting this bastard form and/or explaining how it can be done in practice, then it would certainly be worth exploring. But not otherwise.

Here, I think, we run into questions of scale. What are pidgins if they are not "this bastard form". A creole is a pidgin with its trousers on. So consider the possibility that AS and Ancient Woopwoop (British?) gave rise to a pidgin which, in time, developed its grammar, refined its lexicon and emerged as this creole which we call English. Is this not feasible ???

In a general way of course it is otiose to consider the standard explanation of Mercian origins (either direct or via bastardy) because nobody has ever been able to establish any linguistic connection between any variety of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. (Save of course the family resemblance between all forms of "Western Germanic", to use their label.)

I rather feel that this is a bit over the top. I saw a little while ago an interesting article (but I have lost the reference, I am afraid) which showed a triangular connection between AS, Modern English and Icelandic. To a non-expert like me quite persuasive in terms of demonstrating lineage to some common ancestor.

At present the orthodox connection between Mercian and Middle English is twofold
1. They were all living in the same place and
2. 'Cos we say so.

Good one. And I dare say you are right. I suppose there must be some evidence for believing that such a thing as a Mercian dialect existed. Where would one find that?

berniegreen

DPCrisp wrote:

"The bastard child of both Anglo-Saxon and Ancient English" is a new way to hack through some thicket that you only encounter by heading off in an illogical direction. Why look for some exotic linguistic history when the evidence of real linguistic behaviour is as plain as day?

Well, Dan, I am not sure that it is that exotic.

At present on one side you have a lot of "evidence" which is used to show that the "real" linguistic history is that ME morphed out of AS. While on the other side you have 3 assertions (1. that the "evidence" is tosh, 2. that AS is a foreign language and not remotely like English and 3. languages don't change quickly enough for this explanation to be sensible) which add up to an argument that there must be another explanation.

But do we really have a good and solid model which explains HOW we ditched both Anglo Saxon and Norman French in favour of English (Middle variety)?

the paradigm itself, the base camp, the direction of the implication, is what is at issue.

I am not as convinced that paradigms are as"inviolable" as you believe. And I also believe that the way in which you upset the existing paradigm and force a re-think is with countervailing evidence.

There are of course different strengths of evidence, ranging from the conclusive through the persuasive to the merely suggestive. When there is a situation in which evidence is at best only suggestive, what would you prefer? To walk away and ignore the issue? Or to make some good guesses and generate some plausible explanations?

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

In the meantime I did hope that the assembled company might have some constructive comments rather than simply taking a contrarian position,

A fair request though I think the contrarian position was yours originally. Still we should all endeavour to apply the Iron Rule about being supportive to new theories.

What are pidgins if they are not "this bastard form".

True but inadmissable in this context because pigins use the vocab of the 'master' language and the grammar of the subject one -- this does not appear to be the case with Anglo-Saxon and Modern English. But I concede that in the Dark Ages any process is theoretically possible.

But there is the general consideration that pigins surely only 'go national' in extreme conditions: either on the Papua New Guinea model where the locals are split into thousands of different languages or on the Honduras model where the subject people are slaves lacking a common language. Neither remotely applies to the Britsh/Anglo-Saxons.

Oppenheimer, who as Nick says, entirely supports the general THOBR position, cannot bring himself to question the Anglo-Saxon-into-English paradigm. But he knows the genetic evidence points to the pre-Roman British population being basically "Germanic" so he comes up with the alternative, if similarly strangulated, theory that therefore the locals could switch over to Anglo-Saxon easily.

which showed a triangular connection between AS, Modern English and Icelandic. To a non-expert like me quite persuasive in terms of demonstrating lineage to some common ancestor

.
I hope you find it. We specialise in these "what if" models. As it were.

I suppose there must be some evidence for believing that such a thing as a Mercian dialect existed. Where would one find that?

Oh it exists right enough. Any slight variation in Anglo-Saxon scribbling becomes a local dialect (if in a different place) or evidence of the language's 'development' (if at a different time).

berniegreen

Mick Harper wrote:

if the assertion is insupportable by the evidence, how did the belief come into being in the first place?

It is not merely the Germanic languages that have required this belief to come into existence but all languages. This is because linguists continue to insist that living languages are evolved forms of dead languages

Well, not really, I think. Quiet contemplation suggests that linguists continue to insist that living languages are evolved forms of earlier versions.

It frequently but not universally happens (vis: the Greek that is spoken still in some villages in Puglia is the ancient Doric dialect) that the earlier versions are no longer in use and have therefore, become "dead languages" but that is coincidental.

and therefore require a huge leap just before the modern languages get written down (ie when the evidence becomes unarguable).

It seems to me that what you are referring to here is not so much the question of language development per se but rather the impact of literacy and the epistemological problem of how we can know anything at all about a non-literate society other than really basic things.

Indeed. But that still doesn't get us sensibly from 300 AD when Britain was a literate society albeit in Latin to 1100AD when it begins to become a literate English society.

If you want to give the knock-out blow to any Anglo-Saxon parentage for English you have to have a plausible scenario to describe what the literate leaders of society did between, say, 350AD and 550AD.

They knew about writing. They knew how an alphabet worked. They knew that the Roman world (and therefore Latin) was going/had gone down the gurgler. They were organised enough to send off over the Channel and to hire mercenaries. Why didn't they create written British? They had a 200 year gap.

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

But do we really have a good and solid model which explains HOW we ditched both Anglo Saxon and Norman French in favour of English (Middle variety)?

This is a frequent problem that AE runs into. A fair-minded observer (hah!) would observe that the side that argues the population didn't do anything except go right on talking its own language wouldn't have to put up any evidence, whereas the side that argued that the local population was originally speaking Language A (Welsh) then changed over to Language B (Anglo-Saxon) then incorporated wholesale chunks of Language C (Norman French) to produce Language D ('Middle' English) would have to produce the evidence.

But that is not the way with established paradigms. Established paradigms are always (tacitly or not) held to be self-evidently true and so not (particularly) requiring evidence.

However, if Bernie really does require a model, how would one go about producing one that showed people tend to watch their occupiers come and go without being much interested in language one way or another. It simply doesn't affect them one way or another. Can one actually produce a model for stasis? An interesting question.

berniegreen

Mick Harper wrote:

What are pidgins if they are not "this bastard form".

True. However I was not aware that there was an iron-clad rule for all pidgins. Surely that trading pidgin (half Norwegian/half Russian) that developed in the nineteenth century was an absolute dogs breakfast with random lexical and grammatical inputs from both sides, was it not?

which showed a triangular connection between AS, Modern English and Icelandic. To a non-expert like me quite persuasive in terms of demonstrating lineage to some common ancestor.

I hope you find it. We specialise in these "what if" models. As it were.

Yes ! I suspect a hunt for a "proto-English-Icelandic-AngloSaxon" would be in the same league as the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster.

I suppose there must be some evidence for believing that such a thing as a Mercian dialect existed. Where would one find that?

Oh it exists right enough. Any slight variation in Anglo-Saxon scribbling becomes a local dialect (if in a different place) or evidence of the language's 'development' (if at a different time).

Yes but where?

berniegreen

Mick Harper wrote:

But do we really have a good and solid model which explains HOW we ditched both Anglo Saxon and Norman French in favour of English (Middle variety)?

Funny but not fair, Mick. I am not asking for evidence; only for a plausible scenario.

However, if Bernie really does require a model, how would one go about producing one that showed people tend to watch their occupiers come and go without being much interested in language one way or another. It simply doesn't effect them one way or another. Can one actually produce a model for stasis? An interesting question.

I find it hard to believe that the leaders of this settled, civilised society who were ?Romano/Brits? would have been unconcerned and passively watching their occupiers coming and going after 300 years of ruling the roost. After all they had been down to only two legions for some time. So when the last troops pulled out why wouldn't the leading Brits have been saying, "Okay lads. It's all down to us now"

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

But that still doesn't get us sensibly from 300 AD when Britain was a literate society albeit in Latin to 1100AD when it begins to become a literate English society

If you want to give the knock-out blow to any Anglo-Saxon parentage for English you have to have a plausible scenario to describe what the literate leaders of society did between, say, 350AD and 550AD.

Again you're asking the wrong side to produce the evidence. It is a remarkable step, turning one's own language into a written form. So remarkable that (according to us anyway) nobody in Europe did it before the Irish in the eighth century AD. But even according to orthodoxy, the only people to do it anywhere in Europe were the Romans, the Greeks and the Etruscans. That's not much given that writing per se had been around for several thousand years.

In the time period you are talking about we have the single example of the Goths developing a written form, so why single out the poor old Brits? As you say, they only had a hundred and fifty years or so and of course their hands were pretty full with other stuff at the time. Not that we know for certain sure that the Brits didn't cast English into a written form at that time of course.

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

Quiet contemplation suggests that linguists continue to insist that living languermanages are evolved forms of earlier versions.

No! That's the whole point. Yes, of course they claim that but in practice that is not what they do. It is the same thing with Darwinian Evolutionists, they always presume an extinct ancestor, not that existing animals can evolve into one another.

Thus Italian must derive from the dead language, Latin, whereas we say it's from the living language, French (or whatever). Similarly they say Norwegian derived from Old Norse (we say: no, you dorks, from Swedish or German or whatever). English from Anglo-Saxon, German from Low German, Hindi from Sanskrit, Greek from Classical Greek.... the cast of dead languages (or made up ones) roll on and on and on...

Quiet contemplation certainly does suggest that our languages are evolved forms of earlier ones so please, please tell the linguists.

DPCrisp

In: Bedfordshire

My questions to him were more along the lines of - "to what extent is the history of Anglo-Saxon development different from its cousins?". And I was quite surprised by his immediate response of "very little".

Good. But this is the history of writing -- a technology -- not the history of language.

So consider the possibility that AS and Ancient Woopwoop (British?) gave rise to a pidgin which, in time, developed its grammar, refined its lexicon and emerged as this creole which we call English. Is this not feasible ???

I say 'no', but please try to spot cast iron rule yourself: what would make neighbours and kin throw together a neither-fish-nor-fowl language when bilingualism is ubiquitous? Gotta be some inorganic circumstance, innit? (Don't forget that slang is inorganic, too.)

I saw a little while ago an interesting article which showed a triangular connection between AS, Modern English and Icelandic. To a non-expert like me quite persuasive in terms of demonstrating lineage to some common ancestor.

None of this would be happening if Anglo-Saxon and English were not clearly related. That isn't the point...

Well, Dan, I am not sure that it is that exotic.

Well, as exotic as Papua New Guinea or Honduras.

But do we really have a good and solid model which explains HOW we ditched both Anglo Saxon and Norman French in favour of English (Middle variety)?

First, show us the good and solid model that has "we" in it.

I am not as convinced that paradigms are as "inviolable" as you believe. And I also believe that the way in which you upset the existing paradigm and force a re-think is with countervailing evidence.

I don't follow the inviolable bit, but you're only partly right about overthrowing paradigms: countervailing evidence is almost certainly never going to be sufficient, since interpretation of evidence is what the paradigm is all about. "If it gets convoluted, that is evidence of how convoluted things can be!" As with the Great Vowel Movement, they don't even let flagrant self-contradiction stand in their way.

When there is a situation in which evidence is at best only suggestive, what would you prefer? To walk away and ignore the issue? Or to make some good guesses and generate some plausible explanations?

A laudable sentiment, but in practice (hence "Applied Epistemology"), the plausible explanations are soon treated as self-evidently true.

DPCrisp

In: Bedfordshire

Quiet contemplation suggests that linguists continue to insist that living languages are evolved forms of earlier versions. It frequently but not universally happens that the earlier versions are no longer in use and have therefore, become "dead languages" but that is coincidental.

Except that the Historical Linguist's M.O. is to reconstruct a common ancestor that is wherever possible different from the daughter languages. Non-survival of the ancestor is their bread and butter.

Surely we've all scanned enough etymologies to know that they cite overwhelmingly dead languages. And it's kind of inevitable: what does it mean to say "this comes from that" if there isn't some clear demarcation where one language leaves off and the other one starts? But this question has already been answered at the start of etymology.

and therefore require a huge leap just before the modern languages get written down (ie when the evidence becomes unarguable).

{That's funny. Why doesn't it seem to refer to what it says?} Remember: there is no evidence of Vulgar Latin; and what little evidence of late Anglo-Saxon there is is so far removed from earliest English that they say the changes must have been taking place in spoken English, while the ASC, frinstance, continued to use an archaic form.

They knew about writing. They knew how an alphabet worked. They knew that the Roman world (and therefore Latin) was going/had gone down the gurgler. They were organised enough to send off over the Channel and to hire mercenaries. Why didn't they create written British? They had a 200 year gap.

The short answer is that the Church was still present and in control of writing and continued to use Latin. (They might even have been conscious of preserving what little they could of the Empire.)

The long answer takes in linguistic rectitude and not underestimating the difficulty of writing a language for the first time once the opportunity finally presents itself...

alincthun

DPCrisp wrote:

That's assuming there was a rustic Etruscan patois. What if the Etruscans spoke a non-Italian, not even Romance, language because they were (merely) a foreign ruling elite? Etruscan might have died rather quickly if the swapped formalities into Latin.

I have no objection, except that this language, at first sight, seems to come from nowhere. The suggestion that a great part of the inscriptions could have been written in a secret sacred language is far from being more hasardous than yours, given the high religiosity of this society.

So if really the Etruscan inscriptions had been more or less representative of what people would speak, if really this language had really completely disappeared, we could call that disintegration.

Or integration.

What do you mean? Latin + Etruscan = what?

But these are all dialects of Italian. What do they have to do with the, so they say, non-Romance Etruscan and Rhaetic languages?

These dialects were (are) very various. Oscan was not Etruscan which was not Gallic-Ligurian and so on, though they were all based on a same Italian scheme (as in France or in Spain). When Granier de Cassagnac says that the Romanche patois of Engadin are near to the Tuscan ones though they are separated by Emilian and Lombard ones, he refers to specific dialects. At least, he pretends to know what he speaks of.

But he never speaks of a known Rhaetic antique language. I think Rhaetic writings or inscriptions still have not been discovered at his time (which would be interesting).

Granier thinks that in Etruria as in Latium there were popular languages and learned languages. I don't really understand your question. Perhaps a fundamental disagreement between us is hiding behind this question (if I have understood Mick's diatribe), perhaps not.

Mick Harper
Site Admin

In: London

The short answer is that the Church was still present and in control of writing and continued to use Latin

Surely not. The fact that Augustine had to be sent to reimpose Roman order speaks volumes. And in any case the Church being present and using Latin didn't stop the Anglo-Saxons developing a written form. Nah, it's the fact that the English had been useless lummuxes for several thousand years that's the basic reason.

DPCrisp

In: Bedfordshire

I see what you mean. Can you give examples of something similar?

It took rather a long time for Linear B to be deciphered as Greek, Indus Valley script as Brahmi and Pictish as Norse, so I'm not too confident that Etruscan is unknown: it's being worked on by linguists who are taught it's hitherto unknown. (I'd be looking at Celtic/Punic/Phoenician/Greek/Hebrew... in case Etruscan is 'radiating' out from megalithic Corsica. And comparing it with megalithic Messapia.)

What do you mean? Latin + Etruscan = what?

Etruscan (person) + Latin (language) = Latin-speaking/writing Etrurians.

And Rome happily incorporates Etruscan material culture, doesn't it?

I'm not saying that Etruscans were definitely absorbed into Roman society, just that disintegration is not the only way for them to disappear.

I don't really understand your question. Perhaps a fundamental disagreement between us is hiding behind this question (if I have understood Mick's diatribe), perhaps not.

There is certainly a misunderstanding and I'm not sure where it lies either.

People in Etruria now speak a dialect of Italian, but this bears no resemblance to Etruscan as known from inscriptions, apparently; so we can not tell from this whether we are talking about two peoples or one. We have to grapple with the problem of languages denoted by the names of peoples/regions by linguists who don't seem to understand the difference between rulers-who-could-write and peasants-who-couldn't.

Rhaetic is said to be non-Indo-European. This should be based on a surviving non-Indo-European isolate and/or non-Indo-European inscriptions. But if you don't think there are any inscriptions and de Cassagnac thinks they currently speak a dialect of Italian/Tuscan, then I have no idea what the position on Rhaetic really is.

DPCrisp

In: Bedfordshire

The fact that Augustine had to be sent to reimpose Roman order speaks volumes.

So what's all that about the Church nearly extinguishing the flame of civilisation, far from nurturing it?

And in any case the Church being present and using Latin didn't stop the Anglo-Saxons developing a written form.

Yeah, but we were talking about the British in charge of themselves immediately after the Roman withdrawal. The Anglo-Saxons were the new, even-bigger nobs in town. And how did they develop a Latin alphabet written form if the Latin tradition was already dead?

Is there any indication that Augustine re-introduced the Latin that is still in use today? Was he whipping a lackadaisical Roman ship back into shape, or evangelizing a no-longer-at-all-Roman country? (Even the Celtic Church was still using Latin at this point, wunnit?)

Nah, it's the fact that the English had been useless lummuxes for several thousand years that's the basic reason.

I don't deny it, but then there's a helluva big turn-around to explain. (Did anything come of my suggestion that it had something to do with the Normans never being kicked out?)

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