English As North Germanic a Summary

Language Dynamics and Change 6 (2016) 1–17 brill.com/ldc English as North Germanic A Summary Jan Terje Faarlund University of Oslo [email protected] Joseph E. Emonds Palacky University [email protected] Abstract The present article is a summary of the book English: The Language of the Vikings by Joseph E. Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund. The major claim of the book and of this article is that there are lexical and, above all, syntactic arguments in favor of considering Middle and Modern English as descending from the North Germanic language spoken by the Scandinavian population in the East and North of England prior to the Norman Conquest, rather than from the West Germanic Old English. Keywords historical syntax – language contact – history of English – Germanic 1 Introduction The forerunner of Modern English is the 14th-century Middle English dialect spoken in Britain’s East Midlands (Baugh and Cable, 2002: 192–193; Pyles, 1971: 155–158). All available evidence thus indicates that the ancestor of today’s Stan- dard English is the Middle English of what before the Norman Conquest (1066) was called the Danelaw. The texts in this dialect have a recognizable syntax that separates them from a different and also identifiable Middle English system, broadly termed ‘southern.’ In our book English:TheLanguageoftheVikings (Emonds and Faarlund, 2014), we try to determine the synchronic nature and © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/22105832-00601002 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:16:31AM via free access 2 faarlund and emonds historic source of this East Midlands version of Middle English, which then also reveals the source of Modern English. The lexicon alone cannot be used to decide these questions. What must instead determine the conclusions is the grammatical system, specifically the syntactic constructions. As elements from other domains of language, syntax may of course also be borrowed under certain circumstances, but it happens to a much lesser extent than is the case with vocabulary. Syntactic continuity and stability through history is therefore a clear indication of a genealogical linguistic relationship. In our context it is significant that the syntax of Middle and Modern English is much more Scandinavian in nature than it is French, despite the strong and long-lasting Norman influence on the English lexicon. In the book, we show that both synchronically and historically, Middle (and Modern) English is unmistakably North Germanic and not West Germanic. (Uncontroversially, Old English, just like Dutch and German, is West Ger- manic.) That is, Middle English did not develop from Old English. Old English is the language of mainly West Saxon texts, of which the last exemplars are widely taken to be the earlier Peterborough Chronicles through 1121 (Freeborn, 1998: 82). We claim that Middle and Modern English are instead direct descendants of the language spoken by Scandinavians who had relocated to England over more than two centuries prior to the Norman Conquest. We refer to this earlier language as Norse.1 Since this language, over time, acquired a large component of words from Old English, we may use the synonym “Anglicized Norse” for the early Middle English of the East Midlands spoken and written in the 12th and 13th centuries. William the Conqueror and his French-speaking Norman armies overran and completely subdued all of England in 1066 and the decades following. As a result of this, both the English and Scandinavians were thoroughly dispos- sessed. The miserable circumstances gave rise to a complete fusion of two previ- ously separate populations, speakers of Old English and speakers of Norse. The two distinct linguistic communities of the time before 1066 ended up speaking a single language by, say, 1300, i.e., what is today called Middle English. The change from two languages to one in the 12th and 13th centuries is not sim- ply the merging of two highly similar systems. All sources agree that Middle English has great numbers of both Old English and Norse words (in addition, 1 The term ‘Old Norse’ is conventionally used for the Western dialects of Old Scandinavian, those of Norway and Iceland, excluding the East Scandinavian of Denmark and Sweden. Since the Norsemen who settled in England mainly came from Denmark and Norway, we have adopted the rarely used term ‘Norse’ as a synonym of the more cumbersome ‘Old Scandinavian.’ Language Dynamics and Change 6 (2016) 1–17 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:16:31AM via free access english as north germanic 3 Old English and Norse had a high percentage of mutually comprehensible cognates). In light of the syntactic arguments we present, there are only two plausi- ble ways to describe what happened during the two centuries after the Norman Conquest: i. The traditional scenario: Middle English developed from Old English. Old English underwent many fundamental grammatical changes, incorporated much Norse vocabulary, and became Middle English. ii. Our alternative scenario: Middle English developed from Norse. Norse underwent essentially no grammatical changes other than those initiated on the Mainland, incorporated somewhat more Old English vocabulary, and became Middle English. 2 The Lexicon Claims about genealogical linguistic relationships can be based on only the most primitive parts of the lexicon (small numbers, kinship terms, basic phys- ical items). These items in Middle English, Norse, and Old English are almost all obvious cognates, and therefore irrelevant for deciding between the above scenarios. Nonetheless, there are other aspects of the Old and Middle English lexicons that, at least to some extent, may support our claim. First, according to calcula- tions based on word lists in Freeborn (1992) and Baugh and Cable (2002), about half of all the Germanic words of Middle English are common Germanic cognates. Traditionally, they have been counted as continuations of Old English, but they may just as well be Norse.2 Second, the character of the Norse words in Middle English is telling. Although the majority of the non-cognate Germanic words may be from Old English (perhaps 2/3 of them), the Norse words are typically daily-life words, words for objects and concepts that Old English also must have had. We men- tion just a few typical examples out of hundreds: bag, birth, both, call, crook, die, dirt, dike, egg, fellow, get, give, guess, likely, link, low, nag, odd, root, rotten, sack, same, scrape, sister, skin, skirt, sky, take, though, ugly, want, wing, etc. It is essentially unheard of that a living language on its own territory borrows 2 “[I]f we had no Old English literature […], we should be unable to say that many words were not of Scandinavian origin” (Baugh and Cable, 2002: 7). The traditional practice of assuming that any Middle English word with an Old English cognate is from Old English begs the question of whether their origin is Norse or Old English. Language Dynamics and Change 6 (2016) 1–17 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:16:31AM via free access 4 faarlund and emonds huge numbers of daily-life terms from an immigrant population whose language dies out, yet that is what the traditional scenario is forced to claim about Middle English. Burnley (1992), in fact, concludes that about half the common Germanic words of English are not of English origin, and very few of these, rel- atively speaking, have any source other than Scandinavian. Third, our research shows that the Middle English grammatical lexicon is composed in nearly equal percentages of Scandinavian and Old English elements. For example, the personal pronouns are evenly distributed between the two sources: First and second person pronouns are common Germanic, third person singular he/him is from Old English, she is of uncertain origin, and third person plural they/them is from Norse. Another example is provided by the English grammatical verbs (are, be, come, do, get, go, have, let, were, etc.), which includes slightly more items from Norse than from Old English. Such fusion of grammatical vocabulary is highly unusual in the histories of languages, and in itself supports neither the traditional scenario nor ours. We must look elsewhere for evidence to decide between the scenarios—in the syntax. The main part of our argument is based on the syntactic structures of West and North Germanic, specifically Middle English, Norse, and Old English. In typical cases, even when massive lexical borrowing is underway, native speakers maintain their syntax. Second-language learners eventually adapt and, after a few generations at most, adopt a more or less unchanged native syntax. Under our scenario ii above, this is exactly what happened in the Danelaw/East Midlands. In our book, we show that the grammar maintained was decisively Norse. The second-language learners living among native speakers were, therefore, those speaking Old English. In the following section, we treat a series of syntactic patterns and phenom- ena that Middle English (and in most cases Modern English) shares with Norse, but not with Old English or present-day West Germanic languages. Our overall argument that Middle English descends from Norse depends not on its exhibiting any one specific syntactic feature of Norse, but rather on Middle English having so many of these features, while at the same time exhibiting essentially no Old English characteristics not shared by Norse. 3 Syntactic Properties of Norse and Middle English Not Shared by Old English 3.1 Word Order in Verb Phrases All the Germanic languages at their medieval stages exhibit a considerable vari- ability in their verb-complement order, unlike most contemporary standard Language Dynamics and Change 6 (2016) 1–17 Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:16:31AM via free access english as north germanic 5 varieties.

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