Linguistics English is a Scandinavian language

[Second Summer]

As I have posted in the past, the names for most of the week days are strongly influenced by the Norse pantheon. Now it turns out that the English language itself has much of its roots in the same geographic area.

Contrary to popular belief, the British did not 'borrow' words and concepts from the Norwegian and Danish Vikings and their descendants. What we call English is actually a form of Scandinavian.

"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. He points out that Old English and Modern English are two very different languages. Why?

"We believe it is because Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English," he says.

Read all about it: http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-scandinavian.html

(The article gives several examples of vocabulary and syntax to substantiate the claims.)

 

[mary1]

Interesting theory. It's been a while since I studied linguistics but it's always very interesting to read new ideas.

 

[yakherder]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Adventure...133&sr=8-1&keywords=the+adventures+of+english

Very interesting book for those with an interest in the subject (probably mind numbingly boring for everyone else ).

 

[Freesia]

Makes sense as Vikings were all over the place during that time.

I want to add though that when I was in Holland I couldnt help but notice that the Dutch language was very similar in sentence structure to english, ie the placing of verbs, nouns, full stops, syntax. I remember reading a sign there and it looked like it was written in English but each English word had been replaced by a Dutch word. If that makes any sense. I also get a similar feeling when reading German, only the German words seem to be a lot longer than English or Dutch words : ) .