Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imbnwa | Hacker News Reader

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>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.

Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular.

Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.

You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact.

'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.

No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.

They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin. Certainly the Norman conquerers only bothered to learn the minimum amount of English they had to to talk to the locals. That's why there are so many French words in English.

I think the status of a "creole" language is sort of time limited. After enough people are born speaking it and it's diverged enough from it's origin languages, it's just a language. English probably was very much like a creole language in particular places and times (particularly in northern england after the viking invasions for example).

That attitude is not unique to England though. Latin was the lingua franca of the European literate and scientific world, first because of the Church, and then because of the Renaissance. Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza also wrote primarily in Latin instead of their country's language. Pretty similar to how we are conversing in English right now, regardless of what language we speak in our home town.

>They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin.

This... the point of the matter is that no one thought English was not a language in its own right. Not which landed aristocrat or educated clergymen wrote in English for other non-English speakers, which was the point of writing in Ecclesiastical Latin.

As an aside: would you know any good resources/other ways to learn about the social history of Sicilian-the-language? I know Maltese has had a similar social history, and its Arabic inheritance is very clear.

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