A different version of English?

[Otto Kretschmer]

How would you guys imagine a different version of English after the Norman conquest? One in which different phonological cal changes took place, different features were lost and kept etc

Any thoughts?

[Jonlang]

I'd like to see more plurals with -ren forms (children, brethren).

[So Haleza Grise]

Justin Rye did up a version of English where the Conquest did not take place, mainly emphasising that Norman French didn't do all that much in the way of grammatical change, as opposed to change in the more superficial layer of vocabulary.

Among the changes compared to our English mentioned is that the alterno-English maintains three separate ways of marking noun plurals, one of which is leaving the noun unmarked, somewhat more similar to OE or modern German.

[Otto Kretschmer]

I mean a situation when the Norman Conquest DOES take place but changes that occur in English are different.

[Raphael]

Why would the changes that occur in English be different if the Norman Conquest does take place?

Ok, trying to answer my own question: Perhaps because of some kind of historical linguistics butterfly effect?

[Nortaneous]

Justin Rye did up a version of English where the Conquest did not take place, mainly emphasising that Norman French didn't do all that much in the way of grammatical change

Did it not? The transition from OE to MidE is marked by the Norman Conquest and a dramatic simplification of OE grammar, which happened at the same time, and IIRC there's some evidence that places further from the Norman epicenter underwent the grammatical changes later. Dutch and West Frisian also lost case, but they did so later, and a sprachbund effect isn't entirely implausible.

Why would the changes that occur in English be different if the Norman Conquest does take place?

Ok, trying to answer my own question: Perhaps because of some kind of historical linguistics butterfly effect?

Butterfly effects aren't implausible. The Forth and Bargy dialect had a different (and less comprehensive) vowel shift instead of the GVS, for one thing.

[Moose-tache]

Justin Rye did up a version of English where the Conquest did not take place, mainly emphasising that Norman French didn't do all that much in the way of grammatical change

Did it not? The transition from OE to MidE is marked by the Norman Conquest and a dramatic simplification of OE grammar, which happened at the same time, and IIRC there's some evidence that places further from the Norman epicenter underwent the grammatical changes later. Dutch and West Frisian also lost case, but they did so later, and a sprachbund effect isn't entirely implausible.

Well, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a pretty weak argument unless we can back it up in some way. OE lost inflection on its nouns, adjectives, articles, etc, basically eliminating case from noun phrases entirely, except for a 3-way distinction for pronouns, and a genitive clitic that developed later. But have you seen OE morphology charts? That system was hanging on by a mouse whisker. We don't need anything to explain its loss. It's a loss that was phonologically almost inevitable, and didn't really happen all that much faster than in other places. For example, the loss of final schwa didn't happen until Middle English, around the same time that it probably happened in Danish. The loss of suffixed morphology was going to coincide with something in English history, whether a conquest, or the printing press, or the crusades, or whatever else. We can't assume a causal relationship simply by chronology.

Are there any tell-tale signs of Frenchification in the grammatical change? Not that I can see. When collapsing the nominative and oblique cases, are there any examples of the oblique becoming the new single form of the noun, and in French? Is there a morphological future? Does the indefinite pronoun "one" come from a word for man instead of a word for one? Was the genitive replaced by a preposition? So far as I can tell, there is no smoking gun to show that the change from OE to ME was the result of influence from French. There are, again, coincidences. Using "have" to form perfects was also found in contemporary Germanic languages, so that doesn't mean much. Same with the use of the subjunctive. There just isn't any proof of causation by French influence.

[Otto Kretschmer]

There are several ways in which post Norman English may be different.

Different words may be borrowed and different ones fall out of usage (we may call a horse caval but call a city borough or burg and not city)

Different pattern of influence (like, less influence on vocabulary but more or phonology or even grammar - so we may have English that has half or a third of French vocabulary but is spoken with a thick French accent and phonotactics)

[Ares Land]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Scots yet!

I suppose a good place to start looking would be extant English dialects.

[So Haleza Grise]

I mean a situation when the Norman Conquest DOES take place but changes that occur in English are different.

Yes, I know you said that; but mentioning the conquest at all implies it had some kind of significant impact on English, otherwise why mention it at all? You wouldn't say "imagine a version of English where Henry Bolingbroke still took the throne, but nevertheless, it's a different version of English!" It's that idea that I was responding to. Justin's Alt-English is the only example I can think of that looks at English evolutionary processes in any real depth. His "futurese" is fun too.

Did it not? The transition from OE to MidE is marked by the Norman Conquest and a dramatic simplification of OE grammar, which happened at the same time, and IIRC there's some evidence that places further from the Norman epicenter underwent the grammatical changes later. Dutch and West Frisian also lost case, but they did so later, and a sprachbund effect isn't entirely implausible.

I suppose it depends what claim we'd hypothetically be responding to. If the claim is something like "the only reason English lost case marking is because of Norman French" that'd clearly be wrong, but if it was something like "English is not a V2 language anymore because of the influence of Norman French" you'd have a better argument maybe?

Justin's page is good in discussing this a little bit more than my post did, making the point that OE inflections were always likely to simplify, but there's no guarantee that it would go in a particular direction. It could have wound up simplifying in the direction of Dutch and the Scandinavian languages more than it did in reality. Meanwhile, a lot of French/Latin vocabulary in English post-dates the Conquest significantly and probably would have arrived anyway, just as there are a lot of French loanwords in High German.

Some of the specific French constructions that exist in English - e.g. "it goes without saying" - are AFAIK from Parisian French and much later than the OE --> ME transition. Maybe the pre-existing Norman influence in French smoothed the way for such things but I don't know.

It's hard to say with any of this stuff though! I remember reading something that suggested do-support in English was an artefact of Celtic substrate influence, which doesn't strike me as intuitively plausible, but then again I don't know if it can be dismissed out of hand.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How do you guys imagine phonology of English with a stronger French influence?

[alice]

How do you guys imagine phonology of English with a stronger French influence?

This depends a lot on what you mean by "French". If you're talking about the time of the Norman Conquest, you run into the interesting fact that the French of that time was actually strongly influenced by Germanic, so stronger French influence is a tricky thing to pin down.

[Otto Kretschmer]

How do you guys imagine phonology of English with a stronger French influence?

This depends a lot on what you mean by "French". If you're talking about the time of the Norman Conquest, you run into the interesting fact that the French of that time was actually strongly influenced by Germanic, so stronger French influence is a tricky thing to pin down.

IIRC Norman was mostly dominant at court during the Norman dynastty. When the Plantagenets came to power, Parisian French became more influential. So basically what if Old/Middle French exerted more influence on English phonology.

Like I said before, English with fewer French words but stronger French influence on phonology is an interesting scenario.

[So Haleza Grise]

You've got to keep in mind that French *of the time* whether it be Parisian or Norman French, sounded very different to modern French. Final consonants were still pronounced. <oi> was pronounced /oi/ or /ei/. The nasal vowels were not distinct phonemes. <r> was a dental trill. <c> before a <e, i> was often /ts/. <ch> was /tʃ/. <j> was /dʒ/ .

When you consider French phonology of the time with English phonology of the time, the differences are not that great. French had a greater reliance on affricates (which probably did, in fact, influence English phonology) and some different diphthongs, plus no vowel length. The drastic changes that give modern French its distinct sound hadn't taken place yet.

[Nortaneous]

Justin's Alt-English is the only example I can think of that looks at English evolutionary processes in any real depth.

Not much depth. It's closer phonologically to standard English than some actually-existing dialects are.

[anteallach]

You've got to keep in mind that French *of the time* whether it be Parisian or Norman French, sounded very different to modern French. Final consonants were still pronounced. <oi> was pronounced /oi/ or /ei/. The nasal vowels were not distinct phonemes. <r> was a dental trill. <c> before a <e, i> was often /ts/. <ch> was /tʃ/. <j> was /dʒ/ .

When you consider French phonology of the time with English phonology of the time, the differences are not that great. French had a greater reliance on affricates (which probably did, in fact, influence English phonology) and some different diphthongs, plus no vowel length. The drastic changes that give modern French its distinct sound hadn't taken place yet.

A voicing contrast in initial fricatives is something else English might not have developed without French influence.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Did any of you guys think of English that is under influence of other Romance language than French? Like, Occitan or something even more "exotic" like Spanish, Portuguese or any of the Italian languages?