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Middle English Creole Hypothesis
The Middle English creole hypothesis is the concept that the English language is a creole, which is typically a language that developed from a pidgin. The vast differences between Old English and Middle English have led some historical linguists to claim that the language underwent creolisation at around the 11th century, during the Norman conquest of England. History The theory was first proposed in 1977 by C. Bailey and K. Maroldt and has found both supporters and detractors in the academic world. Different versions of the hypothesis refer to creolisation by contact between Old English and Norman French, between Old English and Old Norse or even interaction between Common Brittonic and English, however evidence supporting the influence of the Celtic languages on English is hampered by a lack of written sources. The argument in favour of the Middle English creole hypothesis comes from the extreme reduction in inflected forms from Old to Middle English. The declension of nouns ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic ( Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Subjunctive
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as: wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred; the precise situations in which they are used vary from language to language. The subjunctive is one of the irrealis moods, which refer to what is not necessarily real. It is often contrasted with the indicative, a realis mood which is used principally to indicate that something is a statement of fact. Subjunctives occur most often, although not exclusively, in subordinate clauses, particularly ''that''-clauses. Examples of the subjunctive in English are found in the sentences "I suggest that you ''be'' careful" and "It is important that she ''stay'' by your side." Indo-European languages Proto-Indo-European The Proto-Indo-European ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Linguistic Typology
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies. Linguistic typology is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on the grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families, emphasizing t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Influence Of French On English
The influence of French on English pertains mainly to its lexicon but also to its syntax, grammar, orthography, and pronunciation. Most of the French vocabulary in English entered the language after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, when Old French, specifically the Old Norman dialect, became the language of the new Anglo-Norman court, the government, and the elites. That period lasted for several centuries until the aftermath of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453). However, English has continued to be influenced by French. According to Laura K. Lawless, more than a third of current English vocabulary is of French origin. And according to the linguist Henriette Walter, words of French origin represent more than two-thirds of the English vocabulary. Background Before 1066 In the early 11th century, Old English was not a single unified language but a dialect continuum that stretched from the southern English coast to the Forth estuary. However, a literary standard had em ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of English
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages (and, possibly, British Latin) that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who Viking invasions of England, conquered and colo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English-based Creole Languages
An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole) is a creole language for which English was the '' lexifier'', meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon. Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic (the Americas and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania). Over 76.5 million people estimated globally speak some form of English-based creole. Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Singapore have the largest concentrations of creole speakers. Origin It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The '' monogenesis hypothesis'' posits that a single language, commonly called ''proto–Pidgin English'', spoken along the West African coast i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germanic Languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken in Iron Age Scandinavia. The West Germanic languages include the three most widely spoken Germanic languages: English with around 360–400 million native speakers; German, with over 100 million native speakers; and Dutch, with 24 million native speakers. Other West Germanic languages include Afrikaans, an offshoot of Dutch, with over 7.1 million native speakers; Low German, considered a separate collection of unstandardized dialects, with roughly 4.35–7.15 million native speakers and probably 6.7–10 million people who can understand it [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irregular Verbs
A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance of the distinction between regular and irregular inflection, which can also apply to other word classes, such as nouns and adjectives. In English, for example, verbs such as ''play'', ''enter'', and ''like'' are regular since they form their inflected parts by adding the typical endings ''-s'', ''-ing'' and ''-ed'' to give forms such as ''plays'', ''entering'', and ''liked''. On the other hand, verbs such as ''drink'', ''hit'' and ''have'' are irregular since some of their parts are not made according to the typical pattern: ''drank'' and ''drunk'' (not "drinked"); ''hit'' (as past tense and past participle, not "hitted") and ''has'' and ''had'' (not "haves" and "haved"). The classification of verbs as regular or irregular is to some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English Irregular Verbs
The English language has many irregular verbs, approaching 200 in normal use—and significantly more if prefixed forms are counted. In most cases, the irregularity concerns the past tense (also called ''preterite'') or the past participle. The other inflected parts of the verb—the third person singular present indicative in ''- '', and the present participle and gerund form in ''-ing''—are formed regularly in most cases. There are a few exceptions: the verb ''be'' has irregular forms throughout the present tense; the verbs ''have'', ''do'', and ''say'' have irregular ''- '' forms; and certain defective verbs (such as the modal auxiliaries) lack most inflection. The irregular verbs include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terrence Kaufman
Terrence Kaufman (1937 – March 3, 2022) was an American linguist specializing in documentation of unwritten languages, lexicography, Mesoamerican historical linguistics and language contact phenomena. He was an emeritus professor of linguistics and anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Academic career Kaufman received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963 with his thesis on the grammar of Tzeltal. Post-PhD, he taught at The Ohio State University (1963-1964) and at UC Berkeley (1964-1970) prior to taking up the position at the University of Pittsburgh that he held until his retirement in 2011. Over the course of his career, Kaufman produced descriptive and comparative-historical studies of languages of the Mayan, Siouan, Hokan, Uto-Aztecan, Mixe–Zoquean and Oto-Manguean families. His work on empirical documentation of unwritten languages through fieldwork and training of native linguists gave rise to a rich body of publish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sarah Thomason
Sarah Grey Thomason (known as "Sally") is an American scholar of linguistics. She is a prolific contributor to academic journals and publications specializing in the field of linguistics, as well as a guest lecturer at different universities around the world and a speaker at international conferences. She was named the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1999, and received the highest honor granted by the University of Michigan to its faculty by being named the Bernard Bloch Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics in 2016. She was also Chair of the Department of Linguistics from 2010 to 2013. She is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Historical Linguistics, as well as part of the advisory board of the Journal of Language Contact. Sarah Thomason is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics and typological universals. Thomason has worke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contact Languages
Contact may refer to: Interaction Physical interaction * Contact (geology), a common geological feature * Contact lens or contact, a lens placed on the eye * Contact sport, a sport in which players make contact with other players or objects * Contact juggling * Contact mechanics, the study of solid objects that deform when touching each other * Contact process (mathematics), a model of an interacting particle system * Electrical contacts * ''Sparśa'', a concept in Buddhism that in Sanskrit/Indian language is translated as "contact", "touching", "sensation", "sense impression", etc. Social interaction * Contact (amateur radio) * Contact (law), a concept related to visitation rights * Contact (social), a person who can offer help in achieving goals * Contact Conference, an annual scientific conference * Extraterrestrial contact, see Search for extraterrestrial intelligence * First contact (anthropology), an initial meeting of two cultures * Language contact, the interaction of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
