Norse derived maritime vocabulary in Norman, French and Spanish

2009

This exploration of medieval language contacts focuses on the impact of the Viking and Norman invasions on the English language of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The book provides background information on post-Conquest society, culture and language, and presents a contact linguistic framework and a description of research methods. The attestations, uses and statuses of Norse-derived and French-derived words in a broad set of early Middle English texts are discussed at length. TOC: 1 Introduction, 2 England in the 'long twelfth century', 3 English in transition: from Old to Middle English, 4 Lexical borrowing and the contact situation, 5 Studying loanwords: methods and approaches, 6 Loanwords in the Early ME corpus, 7 Loanwords in use in an Early ME prose text, 8 Conclusion, Bibliography, Appendices. 316 pp.

Ohio State University Working Papers in …, 2003

The English language throughout its 1500 year history has been impacted by socio-historical developments and changes. One such development took place in Old English: the invasion of England by Norse tribes from c. 800-1000 A.D. was a series of events which had a significant and lasting impact on all areas of the English language. The nature of that social situation and the linguistic outcome is of interest in contact linguistics; in particular, the application by some of terms such as creolization and creole to this process and its outcome has been controversial. In this paper, I examine the English-Norse contact situation and its effects on English and propose that the linguistic outcome of this contact was a koine, and show that this account can better describe the effects of this contact situation on the English language. 1 Socio-historical background A series of Norse invasions of England from c. 800-1000 A.D. resulted in language contact between Old English (OE) and Old Norse (ON). 1 These invasions can be

Transactions of the Philological Society, 2011

Language contact and the transfer of technologies are closely linked and often influence each other. This paper examines a few examples from the domain of seafaring at various periods relevant to the history of Anglo-Saxon England and the Old English language. The origin of Old English segl is used to illustrate prehistoric influences reflected in the recorded vocabulary; the fate of ciula, the Latin adaptation of ceol, shows the failing of a borrowing in the course of the Anglo-Saxon period; and floege and cuople are rare Viking Age survivors of oral and literary contact with two very different languages.

2014

The Vikings from Scandinavia invaded the British Isles during the late eighth century. They prevailed there for the next 300 years, until the Normans arrived. Despite having been such a dominant force they left behind diminutive evidence of their reign. That was the general assumption up until the second half of the nineteenth century when philologists began investigating English. Their investigations successfully established the definite evidence of the Vikings language in English. The Vikings spoke a language called 'Old Norse', which today is an extinct language. Old Norse and Old English were in many ways similar since they belonged to the same language family, Germanic. Therefore, the Old Norse constituents integrated with ease into Old English. These borrowings went undetected for centuries but remain in the language up to the present-day. It is estimated that there are around 400 Old Norse borrowings in Standard English. These borrowings are amongst the most frequently used terms in English and denote objects and actions of the most everyday description. This thesis determines which aspects of the language were and still are influenced by Old Norse and if these borrowings are still productive in Modern English. Moreover, it examines the varied influence Old Norse had on different English dialects.

Arkiv för nordisk filologi 127 (2012): 5-12

The etymology of the term Vikingr is reviewed in this paper and the methodological shortcomings of the many suggestions made in previous scholarship are explored, particularly from the perspective of semantic theory. A majority of the etymologies proffered in prior ac-counts suggest that the term is best to be taken simply as a derivation of the early Nordic verb *wikan 'to turn', much as Old Icelandic víkja (ýkva, víkva) 'to move, to turn' has well-attested nautical usages, even if many previous treatments have failed to take a linguistically economical approach to the development of this defining description in Old Norse studies.

Abstract: English as North Germanic: Modern English is Modern Norse It is well known that Middle English (and its descendent Modern English) has a large number of words of Scandinavian origin. This is conventionally attributed to language contact and heavy borrowing of Scandinavian words into Early Middle English (not into Old English). However, this alleged borrowing was not limited to lexical words, counter to the normal case in contact situations; grammatical words and morphemes were also borrowed. This is unusual, and calls for an explanation. The explanation argued for here is that the roots of Middle English (and therefore Modern English) are North Germanic, with large borrowings from the Old English lexicon, rather than the other way around, as generally assumed, and that the fusion of the two lexicons dates back not to early Scandinavian settlement in England, but about 200 years later, especially the 12th c. during the full impact of the Norman Conquest. Even more problematic is the fact that Middle English and Modern English syntax is Scandinavian rather than West Germanic. The languages share numerous syntactic properties (e.g. word order, P-stranding, infinitival and directional particles, auxiliaries, infinitival constructions, participles and case inflections), which reflect a deep and typologically significant relation of Scandinavian with Middle/ Modern English. With respect to all these characteristics Middle/ Modern English groups with North Germanic rather than West Germanic.

This study questions the received wisdom that surviving Old Norse loanwords in modern Irish are fewer than 50 in number and are mostly shipping-related. The eventual goal is a complete survey of all Old Norse loanwords still “in common use in modern Irish” (Greene 1976: 80), since nothing of the sort has been found in the literature. In the interim, this study proposes a list of 67 words, extant in modern Irish only insofar as they are attested in the principal modern dictionaries, and which in light of available evidence are “of probable Old Norse origin” by direct borrowing. For quantitative purposes, these are counted on the basis of one Irish word per Old Norse etymon and are categorised into semantic domains according to the framework of the Loanword Typology Project (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009), itself an adaptation of the semantic domains proposed in Buck (1949). It is demonstrated that Old Norse loanwords in Irish overwhelmingly belong to the broad category of “culture vocabulary” but are not majoritarily connected with shipping. The main study is followed by a qualitative description of patterns of formal and semantic change observed in the data. These include derivational developments, diachronic semantic changes since Middle Irish, cross-domain semantic shifts and synchronic polysemies in modern Irish. The discussion focuses on extra-linguistic causal explanations for change, but also suggests that some mainstays of cognitive lexical semantics such as prototypicality and radial networks are better-equipped than fixedly categorial semantic domains to account for change after borrowing.

The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English

Terje Faarlund attempt to make the case that from its Middle period onwards, English is a North Germanic language, descended from the Norse varieties spoken in Medieval England, rather than a West Germanic language, as traditionally assumed. In this review article we critique Emonds & Faarlund's proposal, focusing particularly on the syntactic evidence that forms the basis of their argumentation.

2012