110. English in Contact: Norse

Dance, Richard

doi:10.1515/9783110251609.1724

Cited by 6 publications

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“…E.g. ON fiskr with /sk/ vs. OE fisc with /ʃ/ As Dance (2012Dance ( : 1730 points out, these criteria provide the most secure basis for identifying words as borrowings from Old Norse. When formal comparative tests cannot be applied, etymologists must resort to "whatever other evidence is to hand, and (more or less cautiously)…”

Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Possible syntactic correspondences between English and the Scandinavian languages have also been suggested in the literature (see esp. Einenkel 1906, Jespersen 1938, Lindblad 1953, Kirch 1959, McWhorter 2002, and Miller 2004, 2012. Thus, preposition stranding in relative clauses (as in The train he was in) and passives (They were spoken with), omission of the relative pronoun in relative clauses (so-called contact relatives or relative ellipsis), omission of the conjunction that (zero-complementizers), and the phrasal or group genitive have been singled out as probable examples of Scandinavian influence.…”

Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thomason & Kaufman (1988) argued that significant Scandinavian influence was essentially restricted to the lexicon; in their view the close typological similarity of Old English and Old Norse meant that Scandinavian had no significant structural impact on English. McWhorter (2002), Miller (2004, 2012), and Trudgill (2010, 2011, on the other hand, have argued that Middle English contacts with Scandinavian resulted in major structural changes in English, both simplifications and complexifications. At the other extreme, Emonds and Faarlund (2014) and Faarlund and Emonds (2016) have claimed, mostly on the basis of syntactic evidence, that from the Middle English period onwards English became a North Germanic language, which descends from the Norse speaking Scandinavian population in the East and North of England, rather than the West Germanic Old English.…”

Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For Scandinavian influences on English, Townend (2002) offers a thorough overview of the linguistic and historical relationship between Old English and Old Norse; Dance (2012) is a concise treatment of English in contact with Norse, focusing especially on the lexicon.…”

Section: Further Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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External Influences in the History of English

Filppula¹,

Klemola²

2020

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

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Few European languages have in the course of their histories undergone as radical changes as English did in the medieval period. The earliest documented variety of the language, Old English (c. 450 to 1100 ce), was a synthetic language, typologically similar to modern German, with its three genders, relatively free word order, rich case system, and verbal morphology. By the beginning of the Middle English period (c. 1100 to 1500), changes that had begun a few centuries earlier in the Old English period had resulted in a remarkable typological shift from a synthetic language to an analytic language with fixed word order, very few inflections, and a heavy reliance on function words. System-internal pressures had a role to play in these changes, but arguably they were primarily due to intensive contacts with other languages, including Celtic languages, (British) Latin, Scandinavian languages, and a little later, French. As a result, English came to diverge from its Germanic sister languages, losing or reducing such Proto-Germanic features as grammatical gender; most inflections on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs; verb-second syntax; and certain types of reflexive marking. Among the external influences, long contacts with speakers of especially Brittonic Celtic languages (i.e., Welsh, Cornish, and Cumbrian) can be considered to have been of particular importance. Following the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from around 450 ce onward, there began an intensive and large-scale process of language shift on the part of the indigenous Celtic and British Latin speaking population in Britain. A general wisdom in contact linguistics is that in such circumstances—when the contact is intensive and the shifting population large enough—the acquired language (in this case English) undergoes moderate to heavy restructuring of its grammatical system, leading generally to simplification of its morphosyntax. In the history of English, this process was also greatly reinforced by the Viking invasions, which started in the late 8th century ce, and brought a large Scandinavian-speaking population to Britain. The resulting contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings also contributed to the decrease of complexity of the Old English morphosyntax. In addition, the Scandinavian settlements of the Danelaw area left their permanent mark in place-names and dialect vocabulary in especially the eastern and northern parts of the country. In contrast to syntactic influences, which are typical of conditions of language shift, contacts that are less intensive and involve extensive bilingualism generally lead to lexical borrowing. This was the situation following the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 ce. It led to an influx of French loanwords into English, most of which have persisted in use up to the present day. It has been estimated that almost one third of the present-day English vocabulary is of French origin. By comparison, there is far less evidence of French influence on “core” English syntax. The earliest loanwords were superimposed by the French-speaking new nobility and pertained to administration, law, military terminology, and religion. Cultural prestige was the prime motivation for the later medieval borrowings.

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Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Scandinavian Influencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Further Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

External Influences in the History of English

Filppula¹,

Klemola²

2020

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics

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“…Townend (2002: 207) plausibly suggests that in the history of Anglo-Norse contact first borrowing, then imposition took place. Many authors have also suggested that contact with Norse led to simplification (e.g., Bradley 1904, Jespersen 1938, Görlach 1986, Mitchell 1994, Allen 1997, McWhorter 2002, Townend 2002: 196-201, Fischer 2013; others have attributed the simplification of Middle English morphology to internal factors, or generally remained sceptical with respect to the effect of Norse (Burchfield 1985, Braunmüller 2002, Dance 2012. Trudgill (2011: 53-54) suggests that the contact was long-term and co-territorial, and hence not of the right type to lead to simplification.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English

Walkden

Morrison

2017

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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In this paper we investigate the place of origin of the change from Jespersen's Cycle stage II -bipartite ne + not -to stage III, not alone. We use the LAEME corpus to investigate the dialectal distribution in more detail, finding that the change must have begun in Northern and Eastern England. A strong effect of region and time period can be clearly observed, with certain linguistic factors also playing a role. We attribute the early onset of the change to contact with Scandinavian: North Germanic is known to have undergone Jespersen's Cycle earlier in its history, and the geographical distribution of early English stage III fits neatly with the earlier boundaries of the Danelaw.

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Traces of Language Contact in Nominal Morphology of Late Northumbrian and Northern Middle English

Adamczyk

2023

New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics

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110. English in Contact: Norse

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

External Influences in the History of English

External Influences in the History of English

Regional Variation in Jespersen’s Cycle in Early Middle English

Traces of Language Contact in Nominal Morphology of Late Northumbrian and Northern Middle English

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