LINGUIST List 26.1053
Tue Feb 24 2015
Books: English: The Language of the Vikings: Emonds, Faarlund
Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>
Date: 20-Feb-2015
From: Marketa Janebova <marketa.janebova
upol.cz>
Subject: English: The Language of the Vikings: Emonds, Faarlund
E-mail this message to a friend Title: English: The Language of the Vikings
Series Title: Olomouc Modern Language Monographs
Published: 2014
Publisher: Department of English and American Studies, Palacky University, Olomouc
http://www.anglistika.upol.cz/veda_a_vyzkum/publikace.html
Book URL:
http://anglistika.upol.cz/vikings2014/ Author: Joseph Embley Emonds
Author: Jan Terje Faarlund
Electronic: ISBN: 9788024443836 Pages: Price: ----
Paperback: ISBN: 9788024443829 Pages: 180 Price: ---- Comment: Available upon enquiry
Abstract:
It is well known that Middle English (and its descendant Modern English) acquired many Scandinavian words, even though borrowing from Scandinavian into Old English (OE) was negligible. The heavy borrowing from Scandinavian into Middle English (ME) is conventionally attributed to language contact with Scandinavian settlers in England. However, this alleged borrowing has well known characteristics unlike other large scale borrowing.
a) The borrowed words do not appear in texts (our only hard evidence) during early Scandinavian settlement but only after 1150, when traditional histories of English claim that Scandinavian had died out in England.
b) Most of the borrowed vocabulary refers to daily life concepts for which OE had words, which, along with something like 3/4ths (!?) of OE vocabulary, were lost at about the same time (Ch. 2).
c) The borrowing was in no way limited to content words, as is the normal case in contact situations; many grammatical morphemes were also borrowed (Ch. 7), including e.g. the majority of ME grammatical verbs.
These unusual properties call for an explanation.
The book illustrates that also Middle and Modern English syntax is of a Scandinavian rather than a West Germanic (= OE, German, Dutch) type. The bulk of the text treats in turn OE syntactic properties that disappear (Ch. 3), a new, rare construction that appears simultaneously in ME and Old Scandinavian (Ch. 4), Scandinavian properties of ME lacking in OE (Ch. 5), and shared innovations of later English and Scandinavian. Those and other characteristics of ME (e.g., head-initial word order, preposition stranding, split infinitives, post-verbal particles, phrasal genitives, etc.) reflect a deep, typologically significant relation between Scandinavian and ME. This book explains all these facts and patterns by claiming that the linguistic ancestor of Middle/ Modern English is not West Germanic OE but North Germanic. That is, ME descends from (Western) Old Mainland Scandinavian, the newly named “Anglicized Norse.” This ancestor borrowed copiously from the OE lexicon, rather than the other way around.
Considering geography, the version of ME widely agreed to be the principal source of standard Early Modern English is that of the East Midlands, which coincides almost exactly with the areas of earlier Scandinavian kingdoms known as the “Danelaw.” The East Midlands “dialect” of ME is thus a continuation of Anglicized Norse (Ch. 1). In contrast, southern/ southwestern “dialects” of ME, last written in the 15th c., bear much closer resemblance to OE proving that OE survived only as these dialects (e.g. in the poem The Owl and the Nightingale).
Traditional sources often attribute the many syntactic discrepancies between OE and ME to English being hardly written in the 12th c., under the Norman Conquest. However, so many grammatical changes, all in one typological direction and all essentially within a century, are not attested in other similar situations of diachronic change. Moreover, the traditional view has usually ascribed these two dozen changes to “language contact” of OE with Scandinavian. But if Old Norse died out in the 12th c. there was no real intermingling outside the Danelaw of OE and Scandinavian speakers. Thus, the traditional accounts provide no plausible scenario for the transition from Old to Middle English. This book does: the southern population, no doubt after a period of bilingualism, simply switched from OE to Anglicized Norse. By 1300 the change was essentially complete; the language of England was North Germanic.
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
Genetic Classification
Historical Linguistics
Lexicography
Sociolinguistics
Typology
Subject Language(s):
Dutch (nld) English (eng) English, Middle (enm) English, Old (ang) German (deu) Norse, Old (non) Language Family(ies): Germanic
North Germanic
North Sea Germanic
West Germanic
Written In: English (eng)
See this book announcement on our website:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=81233
Page Updated: 24-Feb-2015