HOW NEW LANGUAGES GET BORN

© 2001 by Orchid Land Publications

C.-J. N. Bailey

[9-21-01]

    A revolution concerning how new languages get born has taken place in the past decades.  It has partly been sparked by Derek Bickerton's work on creole (new) languages.  New languages are born in situations of contact with other languages, especially when they are dissimilar.  This work has affected our history of English (see Bailey, Essays on time-based linguistic analysis, Ch. 10), with consequent effects on our understanding of English grammar.  (This understanding has been forwarded by Willi Mayerthaler's work on reversals in marked contexts.)  It has long been observed that languages on isolated islands like Iceland and various Pacific enclaves prior to the days of Capt. Cook and other explorers remained constant over long periods of time.  Change goes with contact.

     Applying the foregoing diagram to the history of English, the source of the Middle English grammatical system was the Old French of the civil and ecclesiastical rulers of the time.  The calquing source was the Anglo-Saxon of the disempowered classes.  Words from their language calqued or translated the functor words of the grammar source.  Thus "the which" calqued Old French laquelle; "whereof" calqued dont (from de unde); and various phrases made up of Anglo-Saxon words calqued the phrasal prepositions of Old French:  Contrast "in front of, for the sake of, in place of," etc. where Anglo-Saxon had for(e).  The grammar betrays many Romance uses--the use of comparatives, the reversal of conjoined pronominal forms, and many other characteristics treated by the writer in the book above and writings published by Orchid Land Publications and in one or another journal or Festschrift.
     The influence of language universals is seen in the reversals just mentioned and in simplifications as well as complications of the Middle English grammar as it developed into today's English.  
     The influence of other languages on Middle English was not very significant.  Some influence in England came from the Keltic language on the ground.  The influence of another form of Keltic on the ground in Scotland was greater and in fact led to the development of Scottish or Lalands out of Middle English.  There had already been the Viking influence on Anglo-Saxon in the North of England, and some of that continued into later times in both England and Scotland.  (Note that Norman French had Viking influences on an already Frankish [and Burgundian, etc.] northern French, distinct from the earlier Romance speech of southern France.)