Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Skim isn't though.
Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.
> Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words;
on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll
> Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc.
Also, skirt and shirt are doublets. Skirt comes from Old Norse, and shirt is native English, and they both come from the same Proto-Germanic root.
It's quite hard for me to get across the slightly differing sounds as it'snot my native tongue. That is why I used "approximation" in my comment, but yes it does seem like an ever lengthening ee sound. The rule is that if the vowel is followed by a double consonant it's a short vowel, single consonant means long vowel, so bil = beel and bill = beeel. But as a non-native it can be very hard to distinguish during a conversation and I am often misunderstood. In fact, I'm not even sure I have the rule the right way around :(
Ha, yesterday I even saw a sign over a low door upon which was written "skall skall ikke". So yes, you are correct with skalle. I have a terrible memory.
Isn't that just a fancy way to say they're from Old English (Anglo-Saxon/Englisc)? This shouldn't be too surprising considering the other main influence of the English language was Old French and the letter combination "sk" is far more common in Nordic languages than in French.
No. For instance, shirt is from Old English, while its cognate skirt is from Old Norse. We gained quite a bit of vocabulary from the Danelaw, and lost a lot of the grammatical complexity (gender and inflection) at the same time. Apart from vocabulary, French barely touched the English language; it was the Vikings that messed things up terribly by settling in with the common folk up north.
The Anglo-Saxons lived in England before the Vikings arrived. So no, they are two distinct languages. The Angles and the Saxons came from Northern Germany, long before the Vikings decided to invade. The Viking invasion was significant, heavily influencing English society and language. Many old towns in England still have the old Norse town ending -by.
Effectively, there are three main sources for English:
* The Anglo-Saxons, arriving around the time where the Romans left.
* The Vikings, arriving around 800-1000.
* The Normans, arriving around 1066.
Not that English haven't changed significantly since then, but these three periods represent the largest number of words increases. The other changes have primarily been spelling.
Also remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Norse languages must've been pretty mutually intelligible, even today German and Swedish is pretty similar even with a millennium or two apart.
There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.
> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part.
It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.
English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though.
Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.
I had always chalked up the Viking invasions to "more of the same" after the Anglo-Saxons had settled, but you're of course right that the two (well, three, I guess) groups came from different geographical areas and the Vikings would of course have spoken a distinctly different language.
I guess I conflated the common view that English is originally a Germanic language with French influences with "English is Anglo-Saxon plus French over time".
I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.
There is actually quite a debate around this now. Modern english is much closer to "scandinavian" than old english in sentence construction, so the new thesis is that old english words were adopted by the norse rulers into the norse/scandinavian language.
It has later been "perverted" by the french ;)
However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.
> However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.
Also, most linguists who are experts in the history of English (Faarlund is an expert on Norse, not English) tend to border on the dismissive when considering Faarlund's theory of English as Norse dialect.
Sounds strange to me that Danish rulers would import back sentence construction with such gusto all the way back to eastern Sweden? Is it not more likely the Danish sentence construction filtered down into common English with time?
I am a bit stuffed today due to a cold, what I tried to explain is that there is no "Old English" in modern english. It was wiped out during danelaw and replaced with scandinavian. They did however adopt local "Old English" words into scandinavian and eventually it evolved to modern english.
Scandinavian languages did not change due to this.
Read the article, they explain it much better than me ;)
This is what wikipedia has to say on the topic "In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking age." I think I understand what you are hinting at but regardless, I'm leaning towards no, it's not just a fancy way of saying that.
I am fluent in Norwegian but moved to Norway as an adult from the UK and I still struggle with the words for shirt and skirt which are skjørt and skjorte, the sk is more of a sh sound, but the vowel in the middle I still cannot get right, those øs just don't fly with my accent.
Interestingly, in Scotland a lot more 'Norse' persists than in English with typical examples including kirk for church, pronounced shirk in Norwegian, and bairns for child much like barn in Norwegian. Other examples I can think of, not just in Scots but in English too, include tor for tower which is tårn in Scandiland (Google translate doesn't recognize tor as an English language word, even though it is used to describe towers all across the UK).
Part of the reason I love watching Scandinavian TV is to listen for snippets that sound just like Scottish-variant English (Scots is something else and neither are to be confused with Scotch).
To my ear the snippets even sound like they're said in a Scottish accent and emphasizes that there's no such thing as a 'pure' language as they all have elements of others which have migrated in.
I would be interested to see if there was a correlation between the linguistic mix and the DNA origins of these populations - perhaps a cool hypothesis/experiment for someone.
https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoYL-dUK1g
Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Skim isn't though.
Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.