English belongs to the
Germanic languages and contains borrowings from Dutch, German, Swedish, however
the greatest number of borrowings stem
from French.
At the end of the period
which closes the date of Old English, there were over 700 borrowings from
Scandinavian, because of the Scandinavian conquest of British islands. The Danish invasion in 878 resulted in the conquest of
British Islands and their occupation.
“ The number of Scandinavian inhabitants in England is
not known. The amount of place names of Scandinavian origin may serve as an
indication that the Scandinavian population in England was large. The
amalgamation of the two peoples, the Scandinavians and the English, was
enhanced by the fact that they had already lived side by side for a few centuries.”
British and
Scandinavian people’s languages were similar, they had the same way of life, they had similar culture, literature
and many words sound almost the same:
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Scandinavian
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Old English
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syster
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sweoster
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fiscr
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fisc
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felagi
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felawe
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Some words were taken from
Scandinavian, for instance: kid, knife, skirt, window, ill, happy, low, odd, ugly. Pronouns like: same, both, till, fro, though,
had been borrowed as well.
From Scandinavian, the English language, took also
phrasal verbs as they did not exist in Old English. The English language was
full of prefixed verbs like in German (ofniman,
beniman).
“ The Germanic diphthong /ai/ became /a/ in Old
English but it was /ei/ or /e:/ in Scandinavian and therefore some unexpected
vowels in some later English occurred, such as eye, nay, hale, reindeer, swain.
However, not many of the Scandinavian loans survived much further than into
Middle English”
The greatest amount of borrowings are traced back to the period between the 9th and 12th
century. It is believed that Scandinavian borrowings are almost only the root -words,
for instance verbs like: call, die, get, give, scream, scrape, take, want.
Compounds like: lawful, lawless, have also Scandinavian roots. Worth to notice
is the fact, that there coexist some words in English with their equivalents
with Scandinavian origin, such as: - hale, from - fro, shirt - skirt, shot -
scot, true - trig, neat – tidy.
From Scandinavian the English
language assimilated such words as:
Wind + auza – window (Danish – vindagua – an wind eye)
Fe +l awe - fellow.
Byr - village
Dale - plane
(avondale, danesdale),
Gate – way (newsgate),
Holm (home) – island
- holmby, longholm,
Thorp – farm (carthorp)
Of Scandinavian
origin are also some geographical names,
such as: Braithwaite, Whitby, and words like: .
niman - to
take,
sweltan - to die,
swestor - sister
Bread meant any kind of food, in Old English it meant also
“piece”. From Scandinavian, the English language has borrowed the sk- cluster,
in such words as: skate, skill, skirt, sky, skin, ski, because in English there was only palatalized sound –
“sh”. The same refers to” j”- in the position of “g”- (jetan - to get), as in
Scandinavian “g” before vowels like: e, i, y, ö, ä, has been read as” j”.
Also the structure of
sentences has been influenced by the Scandinavian languages, changing the
typical Germanic, analytical structure, to the more synthetic, like in Swedish.
The present day lexicon, is the result of contact
between Old English and Old Nors during the period of Scandinavian invasions.
Scandinavian influences were mostly present in Danelaw, near the border of
England, where bilingual usage of words and similarity were to observe..
Thus to English came Scandinavian word categories
connected with trading, selling, money, law, taxes (danegeld). Scandinavian
words in English were mostly related to everyday life.
“Most of the Scandinavian words in Old English do not
actually occur in written records until the Middle English period, though
undoubtedly they were current long before the beginning of that period.
Practically all of the extant documents of the late Old English period come
from the south of England, specifically from Wessex. Scandinavian words would
have been more common in the Danalaw – Northumbria, East Anglia, and half of
Mercia – where Alfred the Great, by force of arms and diplomacy, has persuaded the
Scandinavians to confine themselves….Late Old English and early Middle English
loans from Scandinavian were made to conform wholly or partly with the English
sound and inflectional system. These include (in modern form) by “town,
homestead’ …such as Derby, Grimsby and Rigsby), carl, ‘man’, cognate with OE
ceorl, the source of churl), fellow, hit… law, ragged, and rag, sly, swain,
take… thrall, and want….”
The Germanic tribes generally followed behind the
Celts, but moved further north. Their language developed into three groups of
tongues: East, North, and West.
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2000-500
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500-1 BC
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500 AD
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1000 15-00
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1500 1500-
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1500-2000
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Proto Germanic
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East
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Gothic
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Crimean Gothic
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Vandalic
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North
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Old Norse
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Old Icelandic
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Icelandic
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Old Norwegian
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Norwegian
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Old High German
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Old Swedish
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Swedish
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Old Danish
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Danish
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West
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Middle High German
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German
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Old Saxon
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Middle Low German
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Swiss German
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Pennsylvania Dutch
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Old Dutch
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Middle Dutch
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Yiddish
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Low German
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Old English
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Middle English
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English
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Ld Dutch
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Middle Dutch
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Dutch
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“1.Pre-Old English (c. 450 - 700) 597,- Pope Gregory
sent St. Augustine to convert the heathen Germanic inhabitants of Britain
2.OLD ENGLISH- Early Old English (700 - 900) 787 The
earliest Viking raids took place. In 793 and 794 the monasteries of Lindisfarne
and Jarrow, were attacked and plundered.
3.First stage of Danish invasions from 787 to c. 850.
(plunder)
4. Second stage of invasion (invasion and settlement)
– Danish army lands in East Anglia in 865.
5. King Alfred (reigned from 871 - 899), treaty of
Wedmore 879 – the Danelaw
6.Late Old English (900 - 1100) --1066
Norman Conquest French influence “.1
Commonly English is classified as an West Germanic
language, which contains many borrowings, mostly from French, but also from Latin and Old
Nors.
Recently, dr Jan Terje Faarlund from Oslo University, and Joseph
Emmonds from Olomunk, maintain that the English language is more Skandinavian
language than West Germanic, and that the
Old Nors not only influenced English, but also replaced it. They underline that
not only vocabulary is very similar, and some words identical, but also grammar
structure. This thesis has of course some opponents who, in turn, maintain that
English, however assimilated many borrowings, is an West Germanic Language.
“… the adoption of Scandinavian words did not involve
special education or writing skills. It occurred naturally, in the mixed
households, in the fields, and in the marketplace, among people, at comparable
levels of cultural development. In addition to the propitious social
conditions, the borrowing of words was facilitated by the linguistic closeness
of Scandinavians and Old English. It is not surprising that loanwords that came
into English during this period are not easily recognizable as foreign, not are
they marked as belonging to a special more literate or more elevated level of
usage”
Anyway, it is striking how
some sentence structures in English are similar to those of Scandinavian
origin:
I have lust to drink my fill/Jeg har lyst til at
drikke my fuld.
I have read the book/ Jag har lest
boken.
Here, as well grammar as words are very similar.
In German it is: Ich habe das Buch gelesen, which
has completely different structure with the Partizip Perfekt at the end.
Dr Joseph Emmonds gives further examples of similarity
between English and Danish. One of them is the emphatic function of the article
in the verb:
This we have talked about/ dette har vi snakked om.
The other example is the group - genitive:
The Queen of England’s
hat/ Dronningen av Englands hatt
The next example is the division of the infinitive:
I promise to never do it
again/ Jeg lover aa ikke gjore det igen
Thanks to Scandinavian influence, the English
language lost it's declinations . The declination - endings have weakened already earlier, as to the
stress on the first syllable of the word. The Language has been reduced to
essential forms eliminating endings, thus shortages, simplicity, telegraphic
style. Elimination of cases, caused appearance of other ways to
indicate relations between words in the sentence. One way was the usage of
pronouns: for, of, by. The English language transformed from declinational to more positional structure.
Specific Scandinavian
influence is significant in the Old English and originates in the Old
Nors. Only a few elements came to
English from Swedish.
“
While Sweedish influences have been recognized in Kent, the Kentish jewellery
has closer similarities with the Denmark and Norway than with Uppland and
Gotland….The case for an exclusive East- Anglian Sweedish link is undermined by
finds from Kent. For example, the warrior of the buckle from Finglesham, in
Kent, is attributed to Swedish workman workmanship…”
To sum up, the
Scandinavian influence on the Old English was significant and resulted in many
changes in the English, concerning vocabulary and sentence structure. The
English nowadays is an emphatic language without stress on declinations and
with extended verb domain. In these respects, it is similar to Norwegian,
Swedish and Danish. The English language lost it’s analytical structure, which
is present in German, due to Scandinavian influence. Similarity is so striking,
that linguists argue with the West Germanic origin of English, trying to prove
it’s Scandinavian roots.
Bibliography
Theinl, K.,(2009), Old
English - The Scandinavian Influence on Old English: Textual Work on Bede’s
Account of the poet Caedmon...
Algeo,J,(2010)
sixth editionThe Origins and Development of the
English Language, p. 253
red.Lapidge M,,Godden, M.,
Keynes,s. (1993), CUP, Anglo-Saxon England, p 44
.