Back at it again! This week I started off looking at the influences of French on English before I realised that I missed a step. I was assuming that Jutes, Angles and Saxons, speaking a Germanic language would have the same contributions as the Norse language and almost skipped them. This would have been terrible as I have since discovered that the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons spoke west Germanic where the Nordic and Scandinavians spoke north Germanic. While the two languages are both Germanic and closely related, they do have some important differences and influenced English in some big ways.
So, continuing
from the west Germanic invasion, Scandinavian contact with England really began
in 787. During that time there was an overpopulation in Scandinavia (including
modern day Norway Sweden, Finland, and Denmark). They dealt with the
overpopulation by drawing lots. Those selected were cast out. It is likely these
were the people responsible for raiding England costal regions. If you are interested,
you can find out a bit more here.
In 866, after large scale conquest by Ivar the boneless and Guthrum, King Alfred
handed over all the land east of Watling Street (a road running from London to Chester)
to the Danes. This area was then under Danish control and was know as the Danelaw. The Danes brought their culture
and language and continued to rule in north and east England until 1066, with
the Normand invasion. For a short time, in 1017 to 1035, England was actually entirely
under the rule of Danish kings. You can learn more about that here.
Danish culture was unique in what they brought as they did not force the natives off the land but assimilated them. The Danes were looking to settle and so the Nordic languages were not reserved only for the elite but were practiced by the entire citizenry, which worked side by side with the locals to work the land. Because of this, the influence of the north Germanic languages on English is unique. Unlike many other invasions that brought new languages, the language was not only for the highly educated and elite of society. Because of this many of the loan words taken from them are basic and used in everyday usage. In fact, even the word loan is a loan word from Scandinavian! Due to the mutual intelligibility of old English (being west Germanic) and old Norse (being north Germanic), with Scandinavians and Saxons inhabiting the same part of England, for communication purposes they likely chose words that were cognates or very similar within the two languages. For this reason, when looking at a breakdown of English words (subtracting French and Latin words, only looking at Germanic rooted words), 50% had cognates in both old English and old Norse, while 36% were found only in old English and 14% only in old Norse. The relations are so similar that actually argue that English may actually be a North Germanic language instead of a West Germanic language. Langfocus does a very good job of actually cataloguing and explaining the relation between the two languages. Check out his video and channel.
The similarities between the two languages are so similar that it is not a problem to read this paragraph with old Nordic words thrown into the mix
[A note on
the letter þ: the Old Norse letter, called thorn, makes the same sound as the
“th” in “thin”.]
Traust me, þó
(though) it may seem oddi at first, we er still very líkligr to use the same
words the Vikings did in our everyday speech. Þeirra (their) language evolved
into the modern-day Scandinavian languages, but þeir (they) also gave English
the gift of hundreds of words.
You can find
this original paragraph here along with some other fun sentences and old Norse cognates.
Some other
aspects of the language that were pulled into the language inconsistently include:
1.
The development of the sound sk. You can see
this in words that have the hard K sound such as sky, skin, scrape, and whisk. In
the West Germanic language, the same sounds were palettized to make a softer sh
sound like fish and ship.
2.
You can also see Scandinavian influence in the
retention of the hard g and k sound, as in kid, get, give, and egg
3.
The Germanic diphthong ai sounding or becoming
like ei as in reindeer. This can cause differing pronunciation for phonemes that
may be spelled the same way.
4.
The use of by for towns. This is seen extensively
in England with names like Thornby, Denaby, Aby, Crosby, Earby, Thornaby, Kirby
Cross, Hemsby seen throughout the lands that were once the Danelaw.
Norse was not only included using
loanwords. It also affected the syntax, structure, and grammar. The pronouns
they, their, and them are all Scandinavian. In old English, they were hÄe,
hiera, him. The words both and same, which have pronominal uses are also of Scandinavian
origins. You can see that while some pronouns were adopted, others were not,
making English pronouns a bit messy. And to make the language even messier, English
adopted the present plural form of the verb ‘to be’; Are. So, we have eom
(became am) and is, from the west Germanic language and then replace eart(2nd)
and sind(plural) from old English with are from the north Germanic languages.
Syntaxis
differences can be seen by relative clauses without pronouns. An example of
this is could be “the man (whom) we saw at the library yesterday.” The ‘whom’
is optional, the use of which harkens to the old English form and the absences
of which stems from the north Germanic syntax. In a similar way, the omission
of the conjunction ‘that’ is also Nordic in nature. I.e., I didn’t know (that)
she was married. The use of shall and will to show future tense comes from old Norse
as well as the use of genitive before nouns (Jerry’s car instead of the car of Jerry’s.)
Some
of the changes incorporated from old Norse made the language change from a Synthetic
language with inflection to a highly analytic language. This is really just a
fancy way to say that a lot of information was lost from words. for example, in
some languages the verbs are conjugated to show tense, gender, plural or
singular, and other similar information. This can be seen easily with the Portuguese
verb ‘ser’ (to be) which has 64 different forms (you can check out this site to see them. It’s in Portuguese
but its pretty self explanatory). Compare this to the English verb ‘to be’
which has 8 forms (be, am, is, are, was, were, being, been) 8 forms for English
is actually a lot because the verb to be is actually irregular. Most verbs only
have 5 forms (the root, 3rd person singular, present participle,
past and past participle). Because of this, word order and preposition become
very important to the English language.
All of this is discussed in much more detail here and here. I encourage you to check them out.
As
if the Nordic language hadn’t already made enough of a mess of English, we also
adopted the use of some odd plural forms rather inconsistently from old Norse
like the -en forms. For example, children, oxen, and brethren. English also
adopted the north Germanic syntax of placing verbs before the object. Preposition
stranding is another aspect of old Norse that we took. That is, prepositions at
the end of sentences without the noun that would usually follow. Last is split
infinitives. That is placing negatives adverbs between the ‘to’ and the rood
verb. For example, “to slowly swim” has an adverb between to and swim. Some of
the examples that Langfocus uses in this video can be seen below.
You can see
that old Norse had a huge effect on English that I almost missed. There are
many parts of the language that were inconsistently adopted into English that
can make the language very confusing to a student trying to learn or a teacher
trying to explain. Next week I will be looking at the French influences. I’ll
hope to see you then.
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