Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
I would disagree with the "creole" designation; it really is mostly a matter of French vocabulary. Middle High German is also quite different from Old High German in roughly the same way that OE differs from ME. I.e., OHG is almost completely incomprehensible to a modern German speaker in the same way that OE is incomprehensible to a modern English speaker. MHG, by contrast, can be sort of halfway read by a modern German speaker in the exact same way that ME can sort of be halfway read by a modern English speaker.
(Norse also had a significant effect on English as well, since there was about 200 years of the Danelaw. )
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Well I'm not a linguist, but I have come across some who think it is a creole. English loses much of its inflexions and adopts French word order as well as the "s" plural. That's a pretty large grammatical change and it is a change in the direction of French.
Given that after the Conquest all kinds of official business was transacted and written in French or Latin, I suppose one could argue that with the decline in written English the spoken English, initially not used by the ruling class, was reduced to a sort of lowest common denominator. One notices in modern German, for instance, that not everyone correctly pronounces all the noun inflexions. Similarly, in modern French, there is often a loss of grammatical accuracy in the spoken language. But I tend to like the theory that Norman nobles were brought up in infancy by English nurses and thereby learnt a sort of simplified, childish English.