And yet our grammer, let alone our vocabulary, is a mish-mash of these two very different systems, isn't it.Our grammar is still pretty much Germanic, but we have lost case endings. There have been influences. We tend to put our adjectives before before the nouns which they modify, while (Norman) French puts them after. Both languages developed a periphrastic verbal system which replaced an earlier inflectional one. English took a whole class of verbs, the pretero-present ones, and turned them into auxiliary verbs that are used in indicating verbal mood:
can,
may, etc. There are some grammatical features that have been borrowed, e.g., the Romance suffix -
er used to derive agentive nouns, replaced the older one.
Pidgins tend to be ad hoc and simple languages creating from the vocabulary of the dominant language in a language contact situation. The vocabulary tends to be limited and focused usually on business transactions or getting work done. They tend not to have inflectional systems, but rely purely on word order for syntax. Pidgins are nobody's first language. After a while pidgins get adopted and expanded by some group of people and start becoming a first language. The vocabulary grows and the grammar gets a bit more complicated.
Many languages borrow heavily from other ones when they are in contact. Old Irish borrowed heavily from Latin, as did Old English. Middle English borrowed heavily from French. Russian from Tartar and other Turkic languages. But those are all pretty much languages that made it through a contact situation changed but still pretty much a language. You can call them creoles if you want, but they aren't in the sense of how most linguists use the word. English continued to be spoken in England from the time William's troops defeated Harold's and took control of the country. Norman was not the Norman French's first language. They were after all Northmen (or Norse, Vikings). They had dropped their Northern Germanic language for Old French. After a couple hundred years in England, they adopted English. This is similar to what happened to the Franks in northern France, the Goths in Spain, and the Langobards (Lombards) in northern Italy. In each of these situations the dominant group was small and assimilated linguistically to the subjected group's language. They brought some words along with them. Some Romance-speaking subjects no doubt learned Frankish. Learning another language has its economic advantages. But French is basically a Romance language with some Germanic loanwords.
[Addendum: Wikipedia has an article on the hypothesis that Middle English was a creole (
link), though it does not cite references. A short article I found online that gives the pro and con sides of the argument (
link). I don't think the creolist have proved their case.]
