Scandinavian_Influence_on_Old_English_and_Middle_English

The Scandinavian influence in late Old English and early Middle English. . Question: The Scandinavian influence in late Old English and early Middle English. Trace & Discuss. Provide illustrative examples. “In the eight century, people in the present day Sweden, Norway and Denmark began to leave their homes and settle in other parts of Europe. The Swedes went to Russia, The Norwegians went to Iceland and western parts of the British Isles and the Danes went to France (Normandy) and east England” (Gelderen,2006). It is difficult to estimate the extent of the Scandinavian influence in late old English and early middle English period .Baugh (1993) states: “If we restrict the list of borrowed words that exist in standard English which is fully convincing, it’s about nine-hundred”. However other sources say around the figure of 1,530 (Bouza,2010). It is important when tracing the history of the English language, not to just view the extent, but indeed view how, and in what ways, the language changed. Old Norse (Scandinavian language) and Old English had some similarities. The Scandinavians and the speakers of old English had basic words in common, such as man, wife, folk, winter and summer. This connection thus aided the communication between speakers of Old English and Old Norse. Due to these similarities it allowed borrowings of vocabulary from Old Norse to Old English, It was also possible to borrow words twice in a different form (Gelderen,2006). The change that set Old English from Old Norse was palitalization; this allowed words to be re-used as the Scandinavian language did not undergo palitalization. It was possible to borrow a non-palatalized Old Norse word which, in turn, was a version of a palatalized Old English word. This change is now seen in Modern English with such words as: Shirt, Skirt, Shatter and Scatter. The usage of Shirt (OE) and Skirt (ON) today, has a more specialised meaning. Gelderen (2006) provides an example of meaning shift, it is stated that the word “gift” in Old Norse was a payment for a wife. However, a gift in modern day English means generally something you receive. Meaning changes are due to a shift in Old Norse. Another example of meaning shift is in the case of “dream”. The Old English meaning for “dream” is joy, and in middle English it became “a vision of sleep”. The Scandinavian invasions didn’t just influence the vocabulary (unlike Celtic and Latin languages) it also had an impact on Grammar. The grammatical shift through the British Isles was indeed a slow process. This shift started in the north and then spread to south. For example –S was used in Northumbria as early as the tenth century but it was not used in London until the fifteenth century (Gelderen, 2006). This is seen in an example by Chaucer, who uses “Fares” and he adds the –s to portray northernism (Gelderen, 2006: 98). The north also started the simplification of the end of verbs, adjectives and nouns. An example from Gelderen (2006) is the simplification of the verb “we save”. In Old English “we save” was “we neriað”. However, by Middle English the northern parts simplified the ending to “we neries”, however the south still had an un simplified ending:“we nerieþ”. Scandinavian settlers also brought about the third person pronoun taking the forms hi, he, hiefa and hiem, and thus replaced by, they, their and them in the Middle English period. The Scandinavian settlers appear to have a strong influence on place names that still remain in the U.K today. Denison & Hog (2006) state that place names were recorded in the English doomsday book, which appear to have elements of a Scandinavian guise. It is also said that there is a characteristic feature of Anglo-west Scandinavian place naming, Where the specifer follows the generic, an example of this is Kirkoswald, “which responds to an irish-manx name syntax, which suggests that Vikings from Dublin and Man, may have used this syntax with their own Scandinavian name elements” (Denison & Hog, 2006) the use of “kirk” is typically the Scandinavian usage of Church . A frequent component to Scandinavian place name is the usage of ‘village’ and ‘homestead’ such as in Grimsby (grimsvillage). The continued usage of Scandinavian, in place names, vocabulary and grammar could indicate the sheer influence it had on our language, for example, pronouns and prepositions are typically stable in the history of English Language, showing the features that the Scandinavians attributed to the language (Gelderen, 2006).Although Old Norse died out in England under King Cnut (whose court spoke English) it can be said that it was spoken into the early middle ages. Today there is a substantial evidence for a strong Scandinavian influence as we are likely to use/see it in our everyday lives.