For the Official Published Version, See Lingua 133 (Sept. 2013), Pp. 73–83. Link

For the official published version, see Lingua 133 (Sept. 2013), pp. 73–83. Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841 External Influences on English: From its Beginnings to the Renaissance, D. Gary Miller, Oxford University Press (2012), xxxi + 317 pp., Price: £65.00, ISBN 9780199654260 Lexical borrowing aside, external influences are not the main concern of most histories of the English language. It is therefore timely, and novel, to have a history of English (albeit only up to the Renaissance period) that looks at English purely from the perspective of external influences. Miller assembles his book around five strands of influence: (1) Celtic, (2) Latin and Greek, (3) Scandinavian, (4) French, (5) later Latin and Greek input, and he focuses on influences that left their mark on contemporary mainstream English rather than on regional or international varieties. This review looks at all chapters, but priority is given to Miller’s discussions of structural influence, especially on English syntax, morphology and phonology, which often raise a number of theoretical issues. Loanwords from various sources, which are also covered extensively in the book, will receive slightly less attention. Chapter 1 introduces the Indo-European and Germanic background of English and gives short descriptions of the languages with which English came into contact. This is a good way to start the book, but the copious lists of loanwords from Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Low German, Afrikaans etc., most of which appear in English long after the Renaissance stop-off point, were not central to its aims. It would have been better to use this space to expand upon the theoretical framework employed throughout the book. Miller notes in a short paragraph in the preface (p. x) that the “different types of contact are analyzed within the framework of Trudgill (2010, 2011a, 2011b),” who distinguishes two main effects of contact: simplification and complexification. Simplification involves the reduction of grammatical categories and morphology as a result of adult second-language learning (e.g. attrition of complex or redundant inflectional morphology, agreement, and grammatical gender). Complexification results from situations of child language acquisition and bilingualism over a longer term, whereby new grammatical categories are introduced (e.g. new tense and aspect distinctions). Chapter 2 looks at the Celtic, Roman and Germanic background to English and begins by presenting a useful overview of the historical sources and archaeological studies. This is interspersed with research on British Celtic linguistic contacts. In the section on British and Pre-Celtic toponyms, Miller notes that “Celtic river names tend to be fewer in the (south)east and the Midlands where Anglo-Saxon settlement was most dense” (p. 17). Miller must mean the East Midlands. At any rate, he could just as well have said that all Celtic toponyms have this distribution, not just river-names (see the distribution map in Laker 2008: 24). Next, Miller remarks that there were very few Celtic loanwords in Old English. This is correct, but it might have been worth mentioning that the number increases in Middle English and Modern English dialects (Breeze 2002). Many of these later-attested words are likely to have been in use in Old English times too, bearing in mind that the Old English corpus is comparatively small, limited in its dialectal coverage, and was written by a tiny privileged strata in Anglo-Saxon society usually in a focused or standardised form. Interestingly, when he looks at Celtic grammatical influence, he deals with features found in Old English and Middle English, and even some that are characteristic of Early Modern English. When it comes to phonology, Miller again only makes references to changes in Old English. More consistency in presentation would have been desirable. Miller’s list of possible Celtic morphosyntactical features includes the Old English twofold paradigm of ‘to be,’ it-clefts, the development of the progressive, the (-)self reflexive, periphrastic do, and the northern subject rule. Some other features are mentioned only in passing without explanation or illustrative examples, e.g. “expanded ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses” (p. 39) and the “loss of the ‘external possessor’” (p. 40). It is shame that these two features were not discussed because they are found in all major varieties of Modern English (unlike, for example, the twofold ‘to be’ paradigm). Vennemann (2002, 2009) places them in the Old English period, though they are characteristic of Middle and Early Modern English texts. In contrast, Miller (p. 39) views the expanded verbal responses (e.g. Yes, I have/No, I can’t/I will etc.) as an 1 instance of recent influence, paying little attention to the fact that no sociolinguistic variation is found in Old English high-level literary documents and that these are most unlikely to have represented the spoken vernacular of the time. A further consideration here is that there are few texts with natural dialogues in Old English and Middle English, and the expanded responses are characteristic of natural spoken English. In contrast to most scholarship on early contacts, Miller apparently believes that Celtic influences found in Middle English are due to contacts in Middle English (e.g. “northern Middle English and Middle Scots likely borrowed from Brittonic the so-called northern subject rule,” p. 38 – this is not the usual view, nor would it make sense or have any motivation). Although the twofold ‘to be’ paradigm is mainly a feature of Old English, it is worth discussing in a little more detail as it has been the subject of many recent studies. In contrast to all other Germanic languages, Old English has two functionally distinct paradigms of the verb ‘to be’ in the present tense, reflecting a very similar situation in Insular Celtic languages. One paradigm, with b-initial forms, is used to indicate the habitual present or, sometimes, future reference, whereas non-b forms indicate the actual present. Compare the Late West Saxon forms with those of other Old Germanic languages in Table 1: Table 1: Present indicative of the verb ‘to be’ in Old Germanic languages West Germanic North East Germanic Germanic Old English (WS) Old Frisian Old Old High Old Gothic actual habitual Saxon German Norse Sg. 1 eom bēo bim bium bim em im 2 eart bist biste bis(t) bist est is 3 is bið is is(t) ist es ist Pl. 1 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) birum erom sijum 2 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) birut eroþ sijuþ 3 sint, sindon bēoð send, sint sind(un) sint ero sind As Miller makes clear (p. 30, 36, 40), there are different views on the origins of the Old English and Continental West Germanic paradigms. On the one hand, the blended paradigms of Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German could indicate that there were originally two separate paradigms in West Germanic too, and these may once have had a similar semantic distinction as in Old English (though such a distinction, unsupported by a parallel one in ordinary verbs, would probably have been unstable). These days, this idea is closely associated with Schumacher (2009), who argues that there was originally only a single paradigm in Proto-Germanic based on the Proto-Indo-European athematic root present *h1es, as still in East and North Germanic. Only later in West Germanic, i.e. in varieties close to the Celtic speaking west, did a separate Germanic verbal root, originally with the meaning ‘become,’ develop under close contact with Continental Celtic. This situation was then apparently preserved in Old English through additional contacts with Brittonic, while other West Germanic languages developed mixed paradigms. The main criticism of this theory is that there is not a hint of any semantic distinction in the other older West Germanic languages, and the highly unusual blending of forms – especially in Old High German – has not been adequately explained. Alternatively, it has been suggested that a process of semantic bifurcation and paradigm building happened on British soil, either through division of an already mixed paradigm (as, e.g., in Old Saxon or Old Frisian), or through reinterpretation by Romano-Britons of variant verbal paradigms among Germanic speakers of different dialects. The problem with this theory is that scholars who offer such proposals are unwilling to offer any historical morphological analysis of the Old English paradigms. One observation that 2 has often been repeated (starting with Keller 1925) is that the Old English third singular form bið /biθ/ bears a close resemblance to its Old Welsh counterpart bid /bɨːð/ (< LBr. *bið /bið/), and that the short vowel of the Late British form is regular while the short vowel in the Old English form is an innovation. However, the short vowel in the Old English form could have arrived by analogy based on the 2nd singular form bist or the 3rd person actual present is (Seebold 1970: 113).1 What one would like to know is which forms, including the various alternative forms in Old English dialects, are the ones innovated “in the mouths and minds of English speaking Britons” (Keller 1925: 60, my translation) and which forms are inherited from West Germanic. By not supplying such details, further analysis and detailed linguistic evaluation of this thesis is seriously impeded. Schumacher (2009: 260), for his part, claims that the “synchronic irregularity of the paradigm of bið in Old English is so great that it must be due to inherited forms,” and this statement has so far gone unchallenged, also by Miller. What is evident is that the Old English double paradigm must have already developed at a very early stage. Indeed, I would describe it as a black sheep among all other suggested Celtic morphosyntactical influences: it alone occurs full-fledged in the earliest texts, while all other suggested features either first appear or become prominent in Middle English or later (Laker 2008: 28−29).

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