Reddit reviews Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English

This was addressed in a recent book, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English by John McWhorter

>I've tended to see Middle English as more of an Old English/Norman French Creole.

Yes, I think that's definitely the case. John McWhorter makes a couple of really interesting points in his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (good read btw, and link to bonus /r/linguistics discussion of the book), namely that the influence of Norman French probably began well before the Norman Conquest of 1066, because the Brits and the Normans were probably trading and visiting and whatnot for centuries anyway. (He also has a really interesting theory that Norse/Viking invaders contributed to the simplification of Old English's incredibly complex grammar structure, but that's somewhat unrelated!) But the point is that yes, Middle English is less the "next phase" of English, and more a combination of Norman French and Old English.

>Considering how standardized spelling went out the window in the Middle English period

Just a small point, here - there was no standardized spelling until about the 1800s, when we started printing dictionaries 1755, with Samuel Johnson's very popular "A Dictionary of the English Language". Up until then, it was sort of a free-for-all (Shakespeare himself was pretty liberal with the spelling of his own name!). But yes, there was definitely an overhaul of government when the Normans arrived, so we do see a lot of leftover Norman vocabulary and phrases ("law and order" and other "x and y" phrases come from that period of Norman rule). We're left with a lot of divisive vocabulary from that time as well, like "pork" and "pig" - the former refers to the food, the final product, and is from French, because the ruling Normans would've seen that final product, but the latter is from Old English, because the lower class would've been the ones in charge of the animals and the cooking.

From a technical point of view, modern English language was created in the process of many peoples with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds learning the language and morphing it into what it is now. I recommend reading http://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-English/dp/1592403956 . In addition to explaining why modern English is so different from Old English, it plausibly explained a few constructs in Russian that do not exist in Belarusian (an icing on the cake :). There were a few boring chapters in the book, but I see now that the author tried to explain and rationalize many things that seem irrelevant now.

You call it French, I call it a bastardized, stripped down regional Latin as spoken by semi-civilized Vikings.

And, while linguists aren't entirely in agreement on it, there's a great deal of evidence that a number of things having to do with word order and "meaningless do" in the present progressive are directly borrowed from English's Celtic neighbors. Personally, I am convinced. It's basically the old guard linguists who are still sticking to the narrative that has Britain's Celtic languages simply disappearing --with the obvious exceptions of Welsh and Cornish-- into a vacuum. "Our Magnificent Bastard Toungue" by John McWhorter is a pretty good recent book on the subject.