Comments like yours give me the itch to work on my conlangs… I’ve been neglecting them for more than a year now.

And it’s really cool how you’re picking extinct OE features as building blocks for your conlang: ġe- → je- in participles, thou → tu (unless it’s a backed version of OF ⟨tu⟩ /ty/? IIRC /u/→/y/ was around 1100 or so), so goes on. It’s also interesting that you’re messing a bit with the prepositions, such as in dhe muntéanjes instead of on the mountains.

Just for curiosity, that ⟨dh⟩ represents /ð/, right? Was this some later, post-creolisation process?

Tights/leggings

Touka approves this rank!

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. (The intro of this anime is such a banger that I still remember the MC’s obsession with leggings and tights.)

[Sorry for the serious wall of text.]

I’ve heard those claims, too. They’re incorrect.

A creole is born from a pidgin (language fragments) glued into a coherent whole by grammatical rules made “on the spot”. Because of that, it’s practically impossible to analyse the grammar of a creole as the result of mutations over the grammar of any parent language.

However you can do it with English just fine:

• Phonetic erosion makes the case suffixes identical → case is now marked by word order → word order becomes syntactically fixed. Now you can’t say *“your famous blue raincoat at the shoulder torn was” without sounding like a weirdo.
• Phonetic erosion screws with the grammatical gender → grammatical gender gets ditched
• Phonetic erosion merges a bunch of verbal conjugations together → pronouns become obligatory + you need to spam aux verbs to convey subtler distinctions.

Even weirder features like do-support are easy to explain if you look at other Germanic languages (e.g. some German dialects spam tun “do” in a similar way.)

As a counterexample, look at Haitian - an actual creole, with the main parent languages being Fon and French. If you try to explain it as a grammatical descendant of either, you hit a wall already in the plurals:

• Fon: a-nòmàá “bird” vs. ǹ-nòmàá “birds” (source)
• French: l’oiseau /lwa.zo/ “the bird” vs. les oiseaux /le.zwa.zo/ “the birds”
• Haitian: zwazo “bird” vs. zwazo yo “birds”

Fon marks the plural mostly in the noun itself. French in theory does it, but most of the job is done by closely connected determiners, articles, and pronouns. If Haitian simply inherited the plural from either, you’d expect it to be marked before the noun, as a prefix of sorts. It doesn’t: the plural marker is a free word that goes after the noun phrase. And it is not bound to the noun, as zwazo mwen yo “my birds” shows.

I don’t think that contemporary English can be even remotely explained by creolisation. The Romance lexical influence is easier to explain if you had some sort of bilingual ruling chaste, exerting pressure over the language over a few centuries. One that would eat bœuf and porc while the plebs were raising cows and pigs. …and, well, that’s exactly what happened.

Esperanto still has those weird -in- and -iĉ- suffixes. They aren’t a grammatical gender system, but… come on.

Henri (in old French): The English people’s twitter is really crazy, I want to speak English

eotenteors (in old English): I should eat the cheese

Yup - we train ourselves to ignore distinctions as “not meaningful” because of our native languages, and then when we learn another language, one that uses those distinctions, it bites us back. You can get it later on, mind you, but it’s always a bit of a pain.

My personal example of that is from Italian (L2): it took me a few years to be able to reliably distinguish pairs like “pena” (pity) and “penna” (feather), simply because Portuguese (L1) doesn’t care about consonant+vowel length.

They aren’t the same.

살 /sal/ “meat” is pronounced with [sʰ]. It’s roughly like the “ssh” in “grasshopper”.

쌀 /s͈al/ “uncooked rice” uses [s͈] instead. It’s a “tense” consonant; if I got it right the main difference is faucalised voice, you’re supposed to lower the larynx a bit while speaking it.

Since the difference yields different words, they’re a minimal pair so they aren’t allophones but different phonemes. If you speak Korean (I don’t) the difference between those two is on the same level as the one between English “bot” vs. “pot”, or between “bit” and “beet”. However since the contrast isn’t common out there they sound similar for non-speakers, and I think this to be what OP is trying to convey.