RE: In Defense of Bourgeois Pedants

[Rick Kirkham <rkirkham -at- seagullscientific -dot- com>]

From: Bruce Byfield [mailto:bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com] wrote:

> But my point was that, in many of the surviving texts, the
> vocabulary is simpler and the sentence structure less elaborate. The
> reasons are complex, but include . . . 

Telling a more elaborate story of *why* ME is simpler than OE doesn't meet
the point. The former is not a sub-set of the latter, or even a near-subset,
so it is not simpler in a way that it needs to be to justify the claim that
either language is understandable "fairly easily" to a speaker of the other
language.

> My point is that the analytical sentence
> structure that English eventually settled down to was already widely
> used in the Old English period, so the change to weak inflection
> wasn't as great as it might seem.

Can you give me a source for that claim? It contradicts what I *think* I
know about OE. (Of course, any sentence in an inflected language can, by
coincidence, be written in an order that conforms to some inflected
language's rules: you can write a Latin sentence in Subject-Verb-Object
order if you want to. I don't doubt that some OE sentences were written in
an order that would conform to ME's grammar, but it *couldn't* be very many
of them. If it was, OE would not be classified as an inflected language. It
would be classed as a word-order language with an utterly pointless system
of word endings.)
 
> The northern dialects [Scottish and North English] are much closer to
Middle
> English than modern
> standard English, yet are reasonably intelligible even if you were
> raised speaking standard modern English.

I *still* don't understand your point about these northern dialects. Surely,
you don't mean that contemporary Scottish is closer to ME than contemporary
Scottish is to contemporary English!! I can read Scottish newspapers as
easily as I read my own, but I can't make much sense of ME. Contemporary
Scottish is *obviously* much much much much much much much closer to
contemporary English than it is to ME. I invite everyone on this list to
look up "Middle English" and then "Scotland newspapers" on the web and
compare texts. I can't believe anyone would disagree with me on this point.

> Once you get past some of the spelling differences, Old English is
> less Martian than you might think. For example, "daeg" may look
> unintelligible to you until I spelled it as "day." Hearing it spoken
> slowly helps, too.

Granted if I had reference works, like a spelling equivalency chart and an
OE pronunciation expert by my side, I'd understand more. But an ME speaker
trying to read an OE text (or vice versa) would have no such "helps"
available, so this is not relevant to your claim that a 750 AD Englishman
could communicate with a 1200 Englishman "fairly easily". If "fairly easily"
means anything it means "without having to look anything up in a reference
work or consult an expert". 

> Seriously, though, nothing I say is especially unusual or
> controversial. 

Yet, you can cite no authority that endorses it?

> In fact, it's based on a fairly basic understanding -
> strictly undergrad work with a little independent study. That's one
> reason why I don't have references at my fingertips. Another is that
> it's some years since I studied Old and Middle English extensively.
> 
> I'm sorry if I sound evasive, but I didn't start discussing the
> issue with scholarly references in mind. If I can dig out my
> textbooks from the bookshelves, maybe I can find some. If not, you
> shouldn't need to find any exotic works.

Indeed! *I* shouldn't need to! ;-) (But you should. You're the one claiming
your view is uncontroversial.)

> > Your personal success at 
> > understanding both [OE and ME] is
> > not an accurate measure of whether a 750 AD Englishman 
> > could communicate
> > with a 1200 Englishman "fairly easily". 
> 
> . . . the same could be said of the
> original statement that modern people could understand people from
> Shakespeare's days.

Au contraire! Since we *are* contemporary English speakers, our ability to
understand Shakespeare is evidence that contemporary English speakers can
understand Shakespeare. But you are not 
(A) an OE speaker living in 750 (and doesn't know ME), 
or 
(B) an ME speaker living in 1200 (and doesn't know OE). 
You know them both. Hence, your ability to understand an ME text is not
evidence that someone like A could "fairly easily" understand it. Similarly,
your ability to understand an OE text is not evidence that someone like B
could "fairly easily" understand it.

> Anyway, this has been a long discussion to come from a simple point.
> It doesn't really matter to what extent speakers from 1200 and 750
> could understand each other; although I suggest that they could.
> What I was originally saying that English has evolved at different
> rates through its history, and that the greatest change was
> somewhere in the transition from the Late Middle Ages to the
> Renaissance.

Right. It changed most before (according to the poster who started this
thread) there were prescriptive grammars. And then the rate-of-change slowed
with the spread of grammars. Just my point.
 
> But none of this has much to do with tech writing. Let's take it
> off-line before we exhaust Eric's (and everybody else's) patience.

Ok. 

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