SummaryIt has become widely accepted that English has undergone no interruption in transmission, its paucity of inflection treated as a random loss paralleled in Scandinavian. This paper argues that English has in fact lost more of the Proto-Germanic inheritance than any other Germanic language including Afrikaans. These losses extend far beyond inflection: where other Germanic languages overtly mark a given feature, in a great weight of cases English leaves the distinction to context. While there are no grounds for treating English as a “creole“, the evidence strongly suggests that extensive second-language acquisition by Scandinavians from the eighth century onwards simplified English grammar to a considerable extent.

Moriarty, post: 101338, member: 9168 Wrote:What happened to English?

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