Great post! As a native Dutch speaker (and a teacher of that language) I’d like to share some thoughts :

1) English grammar is NOT simple. We all think that because we all speak English and maybe one, 2 or 3 other European languages like French, German or Spanish. We compare those and conclude that English grammar is easy. But it is a false assumption. First of all, there are no simple or difficult languages. It depends on your mother tongue. If it is Russian, Polish & Slovenian are easier for you than English. If your mother tongue is Spanish, Portuguese and French are.

2) Modern English grammar is NOT simpler than Old English grammar. That should be the ultimate conclusion of my 1st point. Again, it depends on your mother tongue. For me, but especially for German speakers, Old English grammar is quite easy because it is so similar to German grammar. For an Icelandic speaker, the same thing applies. I could even go further : modern English grammar is such a mix of Germanic, Celtic, and Romance, that it is actually more difficult (more irregular) than the “fully west Germanic” grammar of Old English.

3) like you said as well, the “simplification” happened before the Norman invasion. You can see it, indeed, in Swedish and the other Scandinavian languages (except for Icelandic and Faroese) but also from Dutch. Dutch also lost its case system and its distinction between masculine and feminin words. It lost its subjonctif mood (even more so than English) and most of its continuous forms (including the gerund) and conjugations (3 forms left). There obviously wasn’t any Norman invasion.

4) Modern English grammar however (I’d like to disagree with you 😉 WAS affected by not only the Norman invasion, but also by the Celtic “substrate” and the North Germanic invasion. Typical for the Norman/French invasion is the change of the word order. Modern English word order makes no sense from a Dutch or German perspective (it is a bit more Scandinavian). Other things are plurals and the “Latin” use of the different past tenses.
I strongly believe in the Celtic do-support influence on English. It is very similar not only to Welsh, but also to Breton (one of my own native languages, next to Dutch and French). The same for the strong use of the continuous forms. Not very Dutch or German (anymore), but very important in English and Celtic languages. The same for the absence of reflexive verbs.

5) Chinese grammar is simple! Of course it’s not. I stick to my 1st point. However, comparing it to European languages (including English), you could make an argument here. There are no tenses, no conjugations, no plurals, no differences between subject and object forms, etc, etc. “She sees him”, simply is “she see he”. Saw, have seen, is seeing, was seeing, have or had been seeing? Doesn’t exist. Simple! 🙂

6) as a kid and teenager I struggled a lot with English. With the vocabulary (when should I use the French word!?) as well as with the grammar. All the – ing forms mentioned above are so difficult!! And why do you say: “I always eat pizza” but not “I tomorrow eat pizza”?? (in Dutch, a V2-language, these are the same: “ik eet altijd pizza” & “Ik eet morgen pizza”)

So that was it! A bit long… I agree. But to give you the short answer as well: yes, I do consider English to be a creole!

Good luck with the site! Looks great!
Lennert

That being said, I’m hoping someone will at least cast some doubt on my term “linguistic path of least resistance” because it feels inaccurate. I know in phonology some constructions have been born from speech taking paths of least resistance, whether the “treaded” path is a result of spacing within the mouth or whether the construction conform to UG (universal grammar), but perhaps this is not what’s happening as the grammar of a pidgin/future creole is formed. It would be nice to be wrong about that. If I’m not, it seems that creoles are, at least when it comes to their utilitarian value, superior to either the superstrate or substrate language. (Yes, I’m intentionally ruffling feathers with the word “superior” LoL.) Looking forward to having my thoughts shrapneled, and thanks for this awesome page.

A couple of examples:
– Occitan – to my knowledge, it never had and army and a navy (there was never and independent Occitan state). Yet, occitan is widely regarded as a language, and never a french dialect, even though it is a gallo-romance language (so, close to french).
– Friulian: never had an army and a navy, but it is regarded as a separate language, and not an italian dialect (same case for sardinian), even though it is a romance language as italian. What is most striking is the fact that venetian is regarded as an italian dialect, even though it had at one point an army and a navy. So how come venetian is regarded as an italian dialect, while friulian not ?
– Frisian: never had an army and a navy, but is regarded as a separate language from dutch and german.

I could keep going, but the point is – there are actually linguistic reasons when deciding on language vs dialect, and it’s not (all) politics.
And yes, mutual inteligibility is (should be) a main criteria. Yes, norwegian and swedish are mutual inteligible to a very high degree (~85%) and constitue a single language. Calling them 2 separate languages so we don’t hurt people’s feelings is silly.
Linguistic should be separated from politics and stop using political corectness as an excuse for not putting together a proper definition for language.

Hi there, David!

That’s a great question!

It might certainly be that the invaders might be more technologically advanced, but looking at English, this doesn’t seem to really hold up under scrutiny. When Britain was overtaken by the Normans, England was, for the time, fairly advanced. They had significant writing centres, for example, which came to influence Europe. Although, France was, of course, also quite advanced, but I think on this point that we’ll have to claim them to be fairly equal.

In regards to language development, what you’re proposing is interesting. However, looking at the state of both German and English (today and historically), their grammars are fundamentally Germanic. Let me explain.

It’s easy to forget that both Germanic and Latin, originally, came from the same language: Proto-Indo-European. As such, it is reasonable to assume that, although they’ve grown apart throughout the centuries, some grammatical features are the same (or very similar).

In German, we find a significantly more grammatically complex system than in, say, English. This could easily be confused as a grammar borrowed from Latin (as a very similar system can be seen there). However, the grammatical system used by German is actually the same system that originally was a part of all Germanic languages – a part of the Germanic inheritance, we might say. Icelandic also retains a lot of these features though many other Germanic languages have gone through a significant simplification process (English and Swedish, for example). We might say that the grammar of German is Germanic: it has simply retained so many of the features of Proto-Germanic that it may seem to have more in common with Latin than with many other Germanic languages.

Similarly, English grammar was actually quite unaffected by the invasion. As explained in the post, many of the grammatical shifts that we see in Middle English were well underway before the invasion and not too many grammatical features of French were borrowed in. Instead, borrowed vocabulary from French is very common – it is estimated that approximately 29% of the English vocabulary is borrowed directly from French and another 29% from Latin, yet the grammar of Present-Day English, although greatly simplified, remains primarily Germanic (for more details, check out for example ‪A History of English: A Sociolinguistic Approach by Barbara Fennell).‬

‪I hope that answered your question! ‬