Talk:Middle English creole hypothesis

message: This article could use a better title, and it reads far too much like an essay. Therefore, I have marked it as needing cleanup. - Furrykef 10:09, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree with you that the title stinks. I will have a look at the contents when time permits and see what can be done with what is actually a promising start at a particularly difficult area. Sjc 10:15, 27 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: I suspect this article might be based on original research. A Google test only turned up a school paper in a cheating database. That and the personal-essay tone lead me to suspect OR. If we don't find any evidence to the contrary in a couple of days, this article might be a good candidate for a VfD. Szyslak 08:55, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: A clarification: This article doesn't seem to be based on the school paper I found. Szyslak 09:05, 31 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Original Research?

message: The use of thou is still a feature of English dialect usage, eg Yorkshire. It is also portrayed as being used by some American religious communities, such as Quakers, or Amish. 193.32.176.177 12:38, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disappearance  of Thou 

message: I don't see the how the french parallel of this caused the dropping of thou.  Thou was used well into the Early Modern English early (come on, we've all read Shakespeare) and in the Middle English era it was alive and well.  I don't think tu was the reason for the dropping of thou. --Blackkdark (talk) 13:11, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Thou in the article

message: Note that also in modern Dutch the old du (thou) was replaced by jij / je (you).
Dutch has formed a new plural jullie (from je lieden, meaning you people).
On the other hand, German still uses du for the singular, and ihr for the plural.
So, maybe this dropping of thou / du in favour of the plural polite form is a West European phenomenon?
Giorb (talk) 14:12, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Not really. Du is still used in Frisian, which is surrounded by Dutch and Low Saxon dialects using je. And thou has survived, at least until recently, in many English dialects and of course in archaic-formal English. To the contrary, Low Franconian (except Limburgish) has lost du completely and did so at an early stage. So, I would consider it unrelated developments.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.169.49.216 (talk) 20:26, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disappearance of Thou in English and of Du in Dutch 

message: I'm a graduating Linguistics major and this article is an atrocity.  I just decided to delete the section on Yes-No questions because the syntactic movement employed in English and French, seen as being a basis for French Influence, is completely unfounded and here's why.
The fact that English and French both invert auxilliaries doesn't prove that French influenced English.  Inversion is a common way of creating Yes-No questions in many languages.  Those that don't exhibit this property, such as Arabic and Irish Gaelic, have word that is present in such questions (h.al and aN respectively.)
In Universal Grammar, questions have the feature [+Q(uestion)] in the head of the Complementizer Phrase.  This must be checked by an element in the specifier of the CP.  In Arabic and Irish the words mentioned above fill this purpose.  In English and French there are no such words.  As a result a syntactic movement, known as T-to-C movement is employed.  Whatever is in the Tense Phrase is raised to the CP. 
Modern English inverts subjects and auxilliaries in Yes-No questions because it has characteristically weak inflection.  As a result of weak inflection, semantically heavy verbs such as 'drive' can't rise from the Verb Phrase to the Tense Phrase and thus can't undergo T-to-C movement.  Auxilliaries, which are semantically light, can occupy the TP and thus can experience this movement.  Finally, in instances where there is no auxilliary in the Deep Structure form Do-Insertion is employed.  The verb do is an expletive("dummy auxilliary") in this usage.
Modern French is characteristically strong and uses a mixture of Subject-Verb and Subject-Auxilliary inversion.
This section was obviously original research.  It couldn't make heads or tails of what it was trying to say.
The source for my argument above:
Carnie, Andrew.  Syntax:  A Generative Introduction, 2nd Edition.  Padstow (Cornwall):  T.J. International Ltd., 2006.
Any chance of having these sections back? It is very hard to comment on them when they have been zapped. I suspect there is a clash of disciplines. The article, what is left of it, seems to be from the discipline of philology, while the criticism is coming from the discipline of transformational generative linguistics. The article does seem to have weaknesses within the format of wikipedia, and has not managed to suggest appropriate references (probably conferences at the moment, as publishing in the area just isn't that quick), but it is not an atrocity, rather a concise summary of one of the most exciting ideas in language study at the moment.  Graemedavis 21:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed the section on Subject-Verb Inversion in Yes-No Questions 

message: This sentence "The loss of agreement between modifiers is perhaps attributable to the reduction to schwa." needs more context to understand what it is claiming. Or perhaps it properly belongs to the following paragraph and not as a separate subject at the end of the paragraph it is currently in? Rmhermen 18:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Unclear 

message: This is a very interesting theory and is in line with some of my thoughts on the subject. However, it should also be remembered that Old English came into frequent contact with two Celtic languages, and Norse, and that these should be taken into consideration too. Norse words are frequent in the north, and are often conflated with Anglo-Saxon ones. There is also some suggestion of Celtic influence on the syntax of English - this would be particularly the case in the north and the west, where people spoke a form of Welsh very late on (up til the modern period in the Welsh marches, and to the 12/1300s in Cumbria) - the Celtic languages have two genders like French. So the creole may be a three/four way one. --MacRusgail 01:42, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Theory + other aspects 

message: The article says that Middle English may have dropped grammatical gender because the Germanic and Romance systems of gender were and are incompatible.  How so?  Three-gender German doesn't seem to have any problem assimilating words from two-gender French (le niveau - das Niveau)--Witan (talk) 15:04, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: French influence in England was much higher than in Germany. French was the official/legal language in England for more than 200 years. The country was ruled by an elite whose members often spoke French as their native tongue. Both languages were widespread throughout the country, so the language contact was much stronger. --Universal-Interessierterde (talk (de)) 01:23, 30 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romance and Germanic gender incompatibility 

message: At the end of the article, there is a list of words borrowed from French, introduced with the following language: "During the reign of the Normans, many words related to the ruling classes and the business of government entered English from French. Among these words are:"  It'd be nice if someone (particularly someone with OED access) checked me on this, but it looks like a lot of these words (e.g. "republic," "executive") didn't come into English until the 16th or 17th century, long after any period that could reasonably be described as the "reign of the Normans." PubliusFL (talk) 16:57, 3 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of words at end of article 

message: I've added some references to indicate that far from being original research, this is a well-known area of discussion; many more could be found. On the matter of the list of French borrowings, I can't see that they add anything to the understanding of the issue here - is there a consesus for just deleting them? djnjwd (talk) 23:20, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: References

message: The debate really came out of the Anthropological vs. Linguistic definitions of Creole.  Anthropologically speaking, a creole is a language which has to be identified by the people who speak it, and being as the linguistic term for such a language didn't emerge until the colonial era, I doubt the speakers of Middle English could identify themselves as creole speakers.  Linguistically speaking, I'd have to say it is a creole, because of the changes and patterns which even match other creoles developed. --Blackkdark (talk) 13:12, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Anthropologically speaking

message: The article should not just tell us what the claims and arguments of the theory are, but tell us the history of the theory itself (it was proposed by xyz...abc modified it in this way...it held currency in this period, but was later discredited etc etc). I've made the first step towards this. 129.67.20.167 (talk) 21:25, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Focus of Article

message: * "However, the reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa (i.e. to unpronounced vowels)" -- schwa is not an "unpronounced" vowel. Perhaps the writer meant that some schwas later dropped out.
* "English responded by dropping genders altogether, but this is only conjecture, and fails to reflect the fact that the neuter gender (it), prevalent in Old English, survives in Modern English." -- by this reasoning, English must still have masculine and feminine genders, since we have the pronouns "he" and "she". Survival of vestiges of gender marking only within pronouns doesn't imply survival of the gender system generally.
* "The French plural descends from oblique formations in Old French and is ultimately of pronominal, not nominal, origin" -- AFAIK, the French (oblique) plural comes from the Latin accusative  nominal plural. Latin itself took some of its nominal plural markers from the pronominal system, but I don't know of anything going in the opposite direction. 71.13.148.220 (talk) 05:39, 21 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Several problems 

message: How is this statement to be understood? "French influence has affected English pronunciation as well. Whereas Old English had the unvoiced fricative sounds [f], [s], [θ] (as in thin), and [ʃ] (shin), French influence helped to distinguish their voiced counterparts [v], [z], [ð] (the), and [ʒ] (mirage)" Old English already had the phones [v ð z]. I've edited the article, so it informs readers about this fact. The only thing I can imagine is that French helped establish phonemes by creating minimal pairs with these sounds. Tobiornot2b 22:00, 02 Jan 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: French influence on [v ð z]

message: The article says:
English began to retake its position from French as England's official national language by 1362 when, under Edward III, Parliament was addressed in English for the first time since the Norman Conquest of 1066.
But the citation here is a reference to the Pleading in English Act 1362 which as near as I can tell doesn't relate to Parliament at all, but rather is about the langauge used in law courts. (Also, ironically, the text of the law being linked to is in French.) --Jfruh (talk) 19:30, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Addressing parliament in English? 

message: New text incorporates three needed improvements.  (1) Whether ME is a “creole” depends entirely on how one defines “creole”. Much of the debate over the ME creole question is debate over the definition, not over the linguistic or sociohistorical facts. This has been clarified. (2) Definitions aside, there *is* a robust consensus that ME is grammatically highly streamlined compared with OE, and that the source of the streamlining is/was contact with speakers of other languages. This point transcends the “creole” debate and needed to be highlighted. (3) Arguably the person who has contributed most to this debate over the last two decades is John McWhorter, who was not cited at all in the existing page. This oversight has been corrected. Many additional references were added as well. LyleHoward (talk) 19:39, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent changes (November 2023) 

message: In the Middle English as a French creole section it states "such as expression of the perfect aspect using the verb "to have" (as in “she has eaten’")" - this cannot be true, the past perfect using "have" existed in Old English, and exists in all Germanic languages today. This should be removed. If these were arguments proposed by the listed authors, then something should be added notifying the reader that some if not all of these propositions are unsupported and hold no real validity. Leasnam (talk) 19:30, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There was a medieval western European sprachbund of a contrast between a simple past vs. a compound past formed by HAVE + participle for transitive verbs, and BE + participle for intransitive verbs.  I don't think this was fully developed in Old English yet... AnonMoos (talk) 00:23, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  past perfect from French