I'm looking for features of Creole Languages according to Thomason and Kaufman.
Their opinion is that Middle English is not a Creole language. In order to agree with them I need their features of Creole. And how they explain Norsk and French influence on Middle English. Where does Middle English differ from Old English?

tickle

I dont think middle english has anything to do with creole. Middle english was spoken in England after the Norman invasion. How do you get creole anything out of that.

Off to do research !

ROLCAM

Old English was mainly a mixture of the Germanic languages of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons. Old English resembles modern German more than it does modern English. Old English had many inflections, as does modern German, and its word order and pronunciation resembled those of modern German.

The vocabulary of Old English was chiefly Germanic, though some words came from the language of the Celts. The Germanic people had learned some Latin words while they lived on the European continent. These people brought some of those words to the British Isles and added them to Old English. More Latin words were added during the 500's and the 600's, when Christianity spread in England.

During the late 800's, Viking invaders from Denmark and Norway settled in northeast England. As a result, many words from Scandinavian languages became part of Old English. Gradually, many inflections of Old English were dropped. People also began to put words into a more regular order and to use more prepositions to indicate relationships between words.

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Middle English. In 1066, England was conquered by the Normans, a people from the area in France that is now called Normandy. Their leader, William the Conqueror, became king of England. The Normans took control of all English institutions, including the government and the church.

Most of the English people continued to speak English. However, many of the members of the upper class in England learned Norman French because they wanted influence and power. The use of French words eventually became fashionable in England. The English borrowed thousands of these words and made them part of their own language. The French-influenced language of England during this period is now called Middle English.

The Normans intermarried with the English and, through the years, became increasingly distant--socially, economically, and culturally--from France. The Normans began to speak English in daily life. By the end of the 1300's, the French influence had declined sharply in England. English was used again in the courts and in business affairs, where French had replaced it.

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Please note that CREOLE is a French Dialect.
This language is spoken in HAITI and also in MAURITIUS.

tickle

That was good input Rolcam, and the invention and increasing use of the printing press in the early 1400s probably encouraged the use of middle english as well. Middle english lent itself more readily to the printed word.

ms tickle

Augenstern74

Hey thanks a lot. I hope your answers will help to some extend tomorrow.

shatriya

Then how come Hindi and Sanskrit words got into English, that too so many words.
Here is a list of most ot the English words that are derived from Sanskrit.

http://www.geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/sanskrit.html

http://www.geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/influence.html

tickle

shatriya, hindi and sanskrit words having nothing to do with the development of middle english. That culture were not direct contributors at that time in England.

Akoue

One of the reasons English has such a massive vocabulary is its reception of huge numbers of loan words from lots of different langauges.

There is a sense in which Sanskrit could be said to be ancestral to all modern Indo-European languages: Like early (Homeric) Greek, Sanskrit is a very old language. Scholars study it, along with Greek, Old Irish, and Latin in their attempt to reconstruct proto-Indo-European language. So Sanskrit belongs to the same family (Indo-European) as English, but there is no direct evolution from Sanskrit to English.

drkpp

Excellent information, ROLCAM !
Congratulations on this article, it describes the needed information so well in a nutshell.
Keep it up.

drkpp

Very correct & good information.