scholarly journals Social elements in the Norman French influence on English

Hum ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 163-179
Author(s):  
Zoran Pervan
Keyword(s):  
Norman French

scholarly journals Does language loss follow a principled structural path? Evidence from Jersey Norman French

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-429
Author(s):  
MARI C. JONES
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Language Loss ◽  
Language Attrition ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Abstract Level ◽  
Level Model ◽  
Structural Path ◽  
Norman French ◽  
The Individual

ABSTRACTThis study examines contact-induced change in Jèrriais, the severely endangered Norman variety currently spoken by some 1% of the population of Jersey, one of the British Channel Islands. Today, English dominates all linguistic domains of island life, and all speakers of Jèrriais are bilingual. The analysis uses original data to test empirically whether Myers-Scotton's (2002) five theoretical assumptions about the structural path of language attrition (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the individual) also have relevance for the process of language obsolescence (broadly defined as language loss at the level of the community). It explores i) whether Jèrriais is undergoing contact influenced language change owing to its abstract grammatical structure being split and recombined with English, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's Abstract Level model; and ii) whether different morpheme types of Jèrriais are related to the production process in different ways and are, accordingly, more or less susceptible to change during the process of language obsolescence, a hypothesis related to Myers-Scotton's 4-M model. In addition to its contribution to linguistic theory, this study increases existing knowledge about Jèrriais and makes data from this language available for systematic comparison with other languages.

Liaison Patterns and Usage in Jersey Norman French

Probus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-232
Author(s):  
Mari C. Jones
Keyword(s):  
Individual Variation ◽  
Channel Islands ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Speech Styles ◽  
Speech Communities ◽  
Usage Patterns ◽  
Norman French

Abstract This study aims to provide the first systematic analysis of liaison in a dialect spoken within French linguistic territory. It focuses on Jersey Norman French (Jèrriais to its speakers), an obsolescent (langue d'oïl) variety spoken in the Channel Islands. Using methodology based on the protocol developed by the Phonologie du français contemporain project (Durand and Lyche 2003), it investigates liaison usage in a number of different syntactic contexts and across two different speech styles. On the whole, the contexts that trigger obligatory liaison in standard French do the same in Jèrriais. However, very different patterns emerge for optional liaison and for conversational vs. reading style. Moreover, despite the fact that high degrees of individual variation are often present in obsolescent speech communities, a striking uniformity of liaison usage-patterns was recorded across informants.

The mystery at Chùrchuro: conspiracy or incompetence in twelfth-century Sicily?

1999 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 226-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Johns ◽  
Alex Metcalfe
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Small Band ◽  
Norman French ◽  
Tax Payers

Immediately after his successful conquest of Muslim Sicily (1060–92), Roger de Hauteville set about dividing the spoils amongst the small band of Norman, French and Italian knights who were his closest followers. This distribution of the land of Sicily and its inhabitants was in part based upon the fiscal documents of the Muslim administration, which were salvaged and adapted to post-conquest circumstances by a small cadre of Greek bureaucrats imported from Calabria. The documents were of two types: lists of tax-payers, known in Arabic as jarā 'id (sg. jarīda; Greek plateia; Latin plated); and descriptions of estate boundaries, known as hudud (sg. hadd; Greek periorismos; Latin divisa). These were the foundations of the Arabic administration of Norman Sicily.

The fate of linguistic innovations

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 302-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Linguistic Level ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Norman French

Drawing on spoken corpus data, this study traces the emergence and development of Norman French-influenced innovations in the nativised L2 variety of Jersey English and compares them to features in the speech of French-speaking learners of English. The comparison shows that such innovations do not differ from errors in a learner variety on a formal linguistic level and that they arguably result from the same processes as are present in foreign language acquisition, such as transfer or simplification. The paper therefore argues that innovations can only be identified reliably in retrospect, once they are more widely accepted in the speech community. It also points to the social factors that are crucial in shaping the use and probable fates of former innovations in Jersey English and suggests a typology of innovations according to their developments.

A Mid-Fourteenth Century Contract for the Choir Roof of Glastonbury Abbey

2008 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 216-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Short Commentary ◽  
Norman French ◽  
Almost All

The Anglo-Norman French indenture discussed in this paper is apparently the first medieval English building contract to be discovered since L F Salzman published almost all the known examples of this kind of text in the 1967 second edition of Building in England Down to 1540: a documentary history. A short commentary sketches the significance of the document for architectural history.

scholarly journals The Middle English Creolization Hypothesis: Persistence, Implications, and Language Ideology

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
David O’Neil
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Universal Grammar ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
World Language ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Haitian Creole ◽  
History Of ◽  
Norman French

AbstractBailey and Maroldt (1977) and Domingue (1977) were the first to argue that language contact during the Middle Ages between Old English and both Old Norse and Norman French resulted in linguistic creolization. This theory, known as the Middle English creolization hypothesis, implies that Middle English, and perhaps Modern English as well, should be classified as a creole. Though frequently discredited on historic, linguistic, and terminological grounds, the creolization hypothesis has attracted interest for longer than might be expected. This paper argues that the persistence of the hypothesis may be ideologically motivated. The first section examines connotations of the term “creole” and applies these connotations to an analysis of the initial presentations of the creolization hypothesis. The second and third section of the paper review and analyze the forty-year history of the debate, focusing separately on arguments for creolization (and koinezation) between Anglo-Norman French and Old Norse, respectively. The fourth and final section examines challenges presented by the concept of creole exceptionalism to common attitudes about language equality and the theory of Universal Grammar. It is argued that these issues attract greater interest when contextualized within a discussion of a “major” world language such as English than when creolization is understood as an atypical process restricted to “peripheral” languages such as Haitian Creole. This paper also references relevant political issues such as the current controversy among medievalists about the field’s historic lack of inclusivity.

scholarly journals Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 525-541
Author(s):  
William Sayers
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Animal Vocalizations ◽  
Animal Vocalization ◽  
Norman French ◽  
Extensive List ◽  
Linguistic Communities

Walter of Bibbesworth’s late thirteenth-century versified treatise on French vocabulary relevant to the management of estates in Britain has the first extensive list of animal vocalizations in a European vernacular. Many of the Anglo-Norman French names for animals and their sounds are glossed in Middle English, inviting both diachronic and synchronic views of the capacity of these languages for onomatopoetic formation and reflection on the interest of these social and linguistic communities in zoosemiotics.

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