It is often theorized that languages' grammar becomes simplified as a result of contact with another language, where speakers of one language simplify their grammar, or speak in a broken, creole-like form, so that their neighbors can understand them, or as often happens, the new neighbors adapt their newly acquired language to their own grammatical norms.
This could have happened to Cape Dutch, where the Dutch settlers were always in close contact with Africans, south Asians, and English, French, and German settlers.
English grammar and loss of inflection could be attributed to contact with Old Norse speakers, or even the native Celtic inhabitants of Britain. I've tried researching this topic, but I've been unable to locate any information or theories presented on the issue.
Bashar
Ever read the book "The Story of English"? That's a great book everyone should read, about the history of the English language. There is a chapter about the Viking invasions of England, and its effect on the English language, and you guessed it--the grammar of English greatly simplified as a result of having to communicate with the Danes. One aspect was the loss of the German-like grammatical genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) in English.
Porthos
Bashar wrote:
Ever read the book "The Story of English"? That's a great book everyone should read, about the history of the English language. There is a chapter about the Viking invasions of England, and its effect on the English language, and you guessed it--the grammar of English greatly simplified as a result of having to communicate with the Danes. One aspect was the loss of the German-like grammatical genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) in English.
Who's the author of that book, because there's lots of books with very similar titles.
Bashar
Robert MacNeil (from PBS), and I only remember the others' last names, McCrum and Cran.
Porthos
Well I looked up that book on amazon.com, and I checked out the table of contents, and it doesn't seem to have much on the way of the historical development of English in ancient Britain. I did come across a book called The Stories of English, and that dealt with the Viking invasions and all that.
But being as how I won't be buying the book, as I'm trying not to spend money, could you summarize what the authors say about contact with Old Norse, and its effects on English?
Bashar
It is described in chapter 2 ("The Mother Tongue"). They quote extensively from a professor named Tom Shippey, who gives the example sentence "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my wagon" in Old English and Old Norse. In Old English, "Ic selle the thæt hors the drægeth minne wægn," and in Old Norse, "Ek mun selja ther hrossit er dregr vagn mine." So the speakers of each language can roughly understand each other but all the different grammar points are lost on them.
In Old English, "The Horse" is "thæt hors" and "the horses" (plural) is "tha hors"--if no one told you how to form that plural you would never guess that is what it means. Old English also used to have a case system, much like in modern German; the book gives as an example "the king" which would be "se cyning" in nominative and "thæm cyninge" in dative. When you are always having to communicate with people who don't have a full grasp of all this, you have to simplify your language a lot. And so, the case system disappeared, and the plurals got more regular which is why we end most plurals in -s instead of the various plural endings the other Germanic languages use.
greg in noord-frankrijk
Bashar wrote:
(...) the grammar of English greatly simplified as a result of having to communicate with the Danes. One aspect was the loss of the German-like grammatical genders (masculine/feminine/neuter) in English.
This is perhaps oversimplifying "simplification". All grammatical genders were most certainly retained in Early Middle-English, although somewhat caused to change due to the gradual evolution of the noun-marking system. Still remains the problem that written output in Early Middle-English is scarcely to be found for England's literary languages were Old French & Mediolatin between the 11th & the 13th centuries. It is therefore rather delicate to map & date the moving towards "natural" gender with any bit of accuracy. It is all the more difficult to do so as case-marking reorganisation (read : simplification through phonetic elision, then morphological analogy) was preceded, in Old English, by the regular cohabitation of grammatical genders for nouns with "natural" genders for pronouns within the same sentence : « Etað þisne hlaf, hit is min lichama » → {eat this bread, this is my body}, where OE <þisne hlaf> is a grammatical masculine & OE <hit> a "natural" (and grammatical) neuter.
Bashar
You're right about the genders of course. After I posted the first message I happened to look in the "Dictionary of Word Origins" (another fascinating book, by John Ayto) and in the entry for the word "the" it mentioned the breakdown of the gramatical gender in the Early Middle English period--much later than the Viking invasions. Which is why I didn't mention gender at all in my second post.
