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Scandinavian Loans in Old and Middle English

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Scandinavian Loans in Old and Middle English Scandinavian loans in Old and Middle English http://germanic.zxq.net/ON-Engloans.html Scandinavian loans in Old and Middle English, and their legacy in the dialects of England and modern standard English (Updated 15 October 2011) Word colourscolours: green = Old Norse (ON) and Old English (OE); red = Modern English; maroon = Middle English (ME); blue = Modern English dialect; purple = cognates in Modern Scandinavian and German * Old English examples cited are given in an Early West Saxon form unless stated. ** Modern Scandinavian parallels are given where these seem appropriate, and are represented in Modern Norwegian form. This means Norwegian Bokmål unless stated otherwise, i.e. in such cases where Nynorsk or even Danish forms are closer to the ON than the Bokmål ones. Opening remarks Some ON words were already beginning to find their way into Old English, mostly due to Viking raids and later settlement (in the Danelaw ) in England. However the full extent of Norse influence on English did not become clear until the Middle English period of the language, c.1150-1500. The reasons behind this are complex, as is the sometimes subtle interplay between ON and Old English in the early period. Old English and ON were probably mutually intelligible to quite a degree, and this situation both accelerated borrowing and hindered it, depending upon region, the speakers' ethnic background and the words concerned themselves. If a word in ON already had an identical or very similar parallel in Old English, the chances are it would not find its way into Standard English, linguistic excess usually being a bad thing. However this varies according to region, and as the North of England was most heavily settled by Norsemen, there are not a few examples of this principle being ignored. In the south, 1 of 28 3/11/2013 9:03 PM Scandinavian loans in Old and Middle English http://germanic.zxq.net/ON-Engloans.html Saxon words prevailed, and Norse influence was both slower and smaller. It is, however, true to say the language of the speakers of the Danelaw did more to directly change English than did the Norman Conquest of 1066. This was because the two languages – ON and OE – resembled one another enough for the learning of a second language to not be necessary. OE and ME could quite comfortably admit loans from Norse and the reverse was presumably the case. An example to show the complexity of the issues at hand would be the Northern dialect and Scots bairn which means "child" in Standard English. It may come from ON barn (it ) and exists in all the Modern Nordic languages (Norwegian and Danish barn , Icelandic and Faroese barn etc.). Old English also had a version of this word, bearn . The Old English word seemed to fall out of favour in Standard English (i.e. the West Saxon or Early Middle English of the south) reasonably early on - being replaced by child (OE cild ). The current Northern dialect usage could therefore be a result of three possible scenarios: i) The Old English usage was well rooted and familiar enough to remain in use despite standardising tendencies from southern English. ii ) The Old English word was declining until the Norse users maintained its existence by using an identical or very similar word from their tongue. iii ) The Old English word died out completely, and was re-introduced (perhaps unwittingly) by the Norse speakers in the occupied districts. The Norsemen gave us a good number of words that are in everyday use and a fundamental element of the everyday vocabulary of English. Many of the words which came in through Norse were those associated with the sea, law and local administration - as will be seen from the divisions made below. Everyday Norse words in English are, for example: law , fellow , get , take , anger , sky , skin , wrong , same , as well as, most remarkably, the pronouns they , their and them , which ousted the OE equivalents hîe , heora and him . They also gave us the present meanings of words like bread (original meaning “bit, piece, morsel”), dream (original meaning “joy”), earl (original meaning “warrior; hero”), dwell (original meaning “go astray, tarry”) and restricted the meanings of words like holm (original meaning “sea, ocean, water”) and starve (original meaning “die”). Borrowing of pronouns is a very rare phenomenon and illustrates both the intimate relations and deep effect Norse had with, and on, early English. Most loans would have found their way into the language from the 9th 11th centuries, but they do not start appearing in quantities until the written records of the 1200s i.e. Early Middle English. Norse words were relatively slow to show themselves in written verse, but when they did, beginning in the North and Midlands of the country, they appeared in considerable 2 of 28 3/11/2013 9:03 PM Scandinavian loans in Old and Middle English http://germanic.zxq.net/ON-Engloans.html numbers. Most of these words did not endure long, or else are still confined to the dialects (Norse followed by French being the most significant donor of words to the dialects). Norse probably had a lower status even than English in the late Middle Ages, which in its turn had a lower status than (Norman) French and Latin. The effects of Norse speech can be appreciated from the fact that East and West Mercian developed into considerably different dialects in Middle English. There must have been areas of particularly dense Danish settlement for the local Saxons to need to acquire at least a basic understanding of the settlers’ language due to their numbers and social and commercial importance. Moreover, to Nordic cross-border linguistic interference and a form of creolized Old English can to a large measure be attributed the inflexional-levelling which occurred in English from c.1100-1350 AD. This process has to a greater or lesser extent happened in all Germanic languages, but the need for the Saxon English and Norsemen to communicate, in languages whose vocabulary but not inflexional endings were very similar, very likely accelerated this process in English. However, not everyone now agrees with this view (advanced, among others, by Jespersen). Robert Burchfield, writing in his The English Language , argues: "This view [i.e. the creolized, flexionless English] , which supposes a period, however temporary, of creolized and virtually illiterate speech, cannot be sustained. It is much more likely that the linguistic changes of the period 900 to 1200 result from an increasing social acceptance of informal and unrecorded types of English ....These informal types of English emerged because of the instability of the Old English declensional system itself ..." (p.14). He continues to point out that the OE case system contained too few clearly distinguishable inflexions required to reflect the relationships between words in a sentence. Therefore the inflexional system, since it was an imperfect linguistic tool - perhaps to the point of hindering communication - was gradually scaled down (to a few easily distinguishable forms) in favour of a system which expressed syntactic relationships more clearly, i.e. prepositions. These, as Burchfield notes, were "powerful but insufficiently exploited". His argument certainly has the force of logic behind it. In defence of the views of Jespersen and others, it is instructive to note, as he points out (p.76): "So when we find that the wearing away and levelling of grammatical forms in the regions in which the Danes chiefly settled was in a couple of centuries in advance of the same process in the more southern parts of the country, the conclusion does not seem unwarrantable this acceleration of the tempo of linguistic simplification is due to the settlers, who did not care to learn English correctly in every minute particular ...". 3 of 28 3/11/2013 9:03 PM Scandinavian loans in Old and Middle English http://germanic.zxq.net/ON-Engloans.html Simplification of the OE case system began in precisely those areas where Saxon and Dane lived side by side. Jespersen draws our attention to the situation in South Africa, where the Early Modern Dutch of the white Boer settlers became simplified into today's Afrikaans through contact with foreign English-speaking settlers and indigenous natives. That this occurred, despite the Dutch case system being a mere pale imitation of the OE system's complexities, would suggest that the need for the OE case system to simplify in the face of Anglo- Scandinavian efforts at reciprocal communication was all the more necessary. The reasoned conclusion arrived at from all this is that the OE case system was already breaking down, and the inflexional levelling that occurred during the late OE period and Early ME period was no doubt accelerated (especially in the Danish settled regions) by Norse influence, but not caused by, Norse influence on the English language. Loss of the case system was essentially a native phenomenon, clearly influenced by, but independent of, the Scandinavian settlements. The Orrmulum written about 1200 in the north-east Midlands contains the first substantial hoard of Scandinavian loans recorded in Middle English. About 120 Nordic loans are incorporated within the poem and some are the first known usage of the words in English, including anger , bloom , booth , raise , scare and notably, the conjunction occ “and” and the relative particle summ “as” (both of which failed to make it into the standard language), as well as the adverb though and the pronouns they , their , and them - these forms did not become standard in Chaucer's English (i.e. that of London) until the 1400s. Among other words used in The Orrmulum we find awe , aye , bait , band , boon , bound , bull , flit , fro , gain , guest , hail , ill , kid , kindle , loft , low , meek , root , scathe , skill , sleuth , thrive , till and wing .
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