"Studies have revealed that about 400 words in English are incontestably Scandinavian in origin and are still in daily use in standard, literary English (Geipel, 1971, p.69). Although 400 words are a mere fraction of those 20,000-30,000 words it must be acknowledged that most of the ON terms left behind by the Vikings are the very bedrock of English lexicon and the most frequently occurring words in spoken English. Geipel also takes this further and states that if rural dialects are added the number goes quickly from 400 to 2,000 items, enough to allow a person to carry on a simple conversation using entirely ON terms."One of these words is "they" and its variations, which you probably use many times a day.
(H/t: Medievalists)
8 comments:
Yep, the Vikings did a number on English. They're supposed to have been the ones who scraped off nearly all our word endings, from verbs to nouns to articles to adjectives. Couldn't be bothered learning all that, and they made the simplified version stick. English is a serious mutt of a language.
And it gets all sorts of interesting when watching ESL speakers carry on a technical conversation.
And then there's the pidgin? creole? variations of English in use in various parts of Asia and probably Africa at this point.
What I've read is that Old Norse shared many word roots w/ Old English, but the inflectional endings were different. As a result, the English & Vikings could carry on a kind of conversation, as long as they left many of the inflections off. So they did.
Eric, I've heard Eastern Europe has some of that as well.
Yes, the Scandinavian languages at home still use inflectional endings as German does, to indicate singular and plural, definite and indefinite, etc.
Eric Raymond had an interesting post recently, which touches on this near the beginning. The idea he discusses is that English is structured the way it is because it got "creoled" multiple times over a millenium or so, with simplifications of the grammar resulting each time it happened: with the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, then with the Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons, then with the Normans and Anglo-Saxons.
A Norse is a Norse, of course, of courss.
There is a minority opinion among linguists that English should be more properly classifed as a North Germanic language rather than an West Germanic language, for reasons similar to what we see here. I don't think they come close to proving it, but it's not crazy.
T99 is correct about inflectional endings. You can notice it yourself if you learn a language similar to your own. I am learning Basic Norwegian for a trip next month. Any words that sounds like an English word (or more rarely, a word I remember from high school German) I tend to stuff into the English pronunciation, even though it's not quite right.
A Norse is a Norse, of course, of courss.
And no one can talk to the Norse, of course?
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