11 ms·

Linguist claims that English Is a Scandinavian language

154 points by mikeleeorg 14y ago

wololo 14y ago
this is also on r/linguistics: http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a_scandinavian_language_what_do_you/ http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a...
jfaucett 14y ago
interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so (since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English language. I'm not an expert but I did major in linguistics and have studied the history of the english language in some depth. For me, the strongest points this new proposal has are the syntactical features that scandinavian and modern english share. Syntactical features i.e. sentence structure being adopted from one language to another is very very rare and when it does occur it happens at a much slower rate. There are a couple week points in the theory though. #1 and the article admits this, Old English is West Germanic. #2 Chaucer's english is vastly different from Old English but I don't think anyone would say its a completely new Language, there are too many similarities, shared vocabularies, etc, this has until now led everyone to believe modern english discends from old english and was mingled up with scandinavian and then norman french. Also, almost all the syntactical similarities the article shows have to do with the split verb that modern english doesn't have. In german "ich habe gestern lange gearbeitet" is in English literally : "I have yesterday long worked" but translated should be "I worked a long time yesterday" . I think they'd need to give support that the split verb didn't die out, (which is kind of suggested in the texts of chaucer and his predecessors), but rather was something that never existed b/c the "original" language, in this case scandinavian, never had them in the first place.
- bitwize 14y ago
  Split verbs do actually exist in modern English. Schoolmarms may enphatically teach that they're flat-out wrong, but linguists have long maintained that English rules of grammar are descriptive, not proscriptive. Actual common use is what is considered to fundamentally dictate the rules, not vice-versa.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    I'm not sure, but I think you're confusing split infinitives with split verbs. Split infinitives are definitely a schoolmarm invention (borrowed from Latin, where the infinitive is an inflection and thus inseparable). I think split verbs are here referring to the possibility of separating verbal auxiliaries from their verb.
    - dunham 14y ago
      I think by "split verb" he's referring to "separable verbs", where a particle, resembling a preposition, moves to the end of the sentence. This sometimes occurs in English, apparently violating the "schoolmarm" rule to not end sentences with a preposition. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    The concept to which you're referring is that linguists describe language without shaping it. Its like saying scientists don't make physics, they observe it. With sociological phenomena the distinction between dictating something and measuring it is finer, but it doesnt mean linguists hate prescriptive grammars.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      I think he means to contrast English with, say, Spanish which has an actual governing, prescriptive body. I googled to find the name of it for you and Wikipedia gave me a much better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators As a primary English speaker, I find it both silly and abhorrent that they even bother but... eh. Whatever.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single parameter? From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).
  - jfaucett 14y ago
    I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings) that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much stricter form. As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were sharing the same island.
    - fusiongyro 14y ago
      I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact? The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.
- sirmarksalot 14y ago
  The joke I always heard about split verbs was, "I suppose then to uphold a bank is the same as to hold it up?" Not to say that really contradicts the theory, though, as the single word "uphold" is essentially vocabulary, and could easily have been borrowed from a West Germanic language, irrespective of its grammatical implications.
- oellegaard 14y ago
  I find the article very interesting being a Dane. Your sentence "I worked a long time yesterday" would be "Jeg arbejde lang tid igår" in modern Danish - exactly the same structure as the English sentence. This applies to most sentences in at least Danish/Norwegian(Bokmål) and English.
tokenadult 14y ago
I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. (I used to live with a roommate during my undergraduate studies who insisted on maintaining a Norwegian-speaking household.) My oldest son the hacker has studied the same languages, as well as Chinese, all of which are family heritage languages for us. I don't buy this press release. English was heavily influenced by Norse, for sure, but at its core it is part of the West Germanic branch of Germanic languages, rather than the North Germanic branch that includes Scandinavian. [Edit to take into account that the source link has been changed, and thus improved, on this submission.]
- zeteo 14y ago
  >I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. [...] I don't buy this press release. Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple languages [1]. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core vocabulary? [1] Here's the Amazon publications list for one of them: http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08 http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple languages. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core vocabulary? So far their publication on the contested point in discussion here is the press release submitted here. The field of linguistics has peer-reviewed journals like any other science, and it has authoritative secondary sources (surveys of world languages) and tertiary sources (encyclopedias of linguistics) and a large scholarly community of people who have more specialized knowledge than (apparently) any participant in this thread, including me, who know English, Old English, modern Scandinavian, Old Norse, and German well enough to dig into the data. What's more, historians have been publishing for generations on the general issue of how Britain was settled by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes after written history had already begun in Britain, and how incursions by "Danes" in Britain were responded to by the local populations. This is not a new field. A new comment, more recently submitted than your reply to my comment, puts the issue well: Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages, all of which share the same Indo-European roots. Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to some extent. That's very familiar to all of us who have formally studied linguistics of English. What's also dismaying familiar to anyone who has studied linguistics is the attempt of nationalists who are partisans of one language or another to claim a connection between their language and some language that enjoys great prestige (here, English). I have nothing against Norwegian. I speak it (a little), and Norwegian was my late grandmother's native language. I have nothing against German. I speak it (rather more than I speak Norwegian), and it was the native language and sole language of schooling for two of my grandparents. I also acknowledge, as I did in my original comment, that BOTH the North Germanic and West Germanic branches of Germanic languages influenced English. My uncontroversial and non-extraordinary claim here, agreed to by most linguists, is simply that the weight of influence on English is such, and the history of English is such, that English is better characterized as a West Germanic language than as a North Germanic language. The most frequently occurring word in English, which is "the," is one demonstration of that. The word "the" is a West Germanic word.
jon6 14y ago
This is the most useless academic 'discovery' I've ever seen. Am I wrong?
- acuozzo 14y ago
  The number zero was considered useless for a long period of time [1]. A certain piece of academic information isn't useless just because you can't think of a use for it, so I'd say yes, you're wrong. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476/ http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0...
  - smegel 14y ago
    > The number zero was considered useless It still is as far as I can tell. Try adding/subtracting it - it makes no difference. Multiplying it just gets you back the same useless number no matter what. Dividing by zero? Don't even go there!
    - bitops 14y ago
      I can't tell if you're trolling or being willfully ignorant? Zero represents the state of "nothingness" - the universe before anything exists. The blank slate, tabula rasa, etc. The empty page before you write anything it. Zero is a very deep concept and it is far from useless. See the book "Zero: history of a dangerous number".
      - femto 14y ago
        Being funny I think. I'd think it's actually a valid point though, if the question is put in the form: Does zero (or its reciprocal) have any existence beyond being a useful theoretical construct? Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach it? Is the universe infinitely big? Can infinitely small things exist? Can a thing be said not to exist (ie. we have zero of it), or is there always a miniscule probability of it spontaneously appearing due to quantum effects? Is a vacuum really empty? If we have zero, how do we measure it in the face of quantum uncertainty? And so on... --- Edit: grammar
charonn0 14y ago
Given the location and history of England, English is probably the biggest mutt of the Indo-European family.
- kemiller 14y ago
  Hindi/Urdu and other subcontinental languages are also Indo-European and their lands have histories and linguistic influences at least as colorful as England's. But English has got to be in the running.
jchrisa 14y ago
I've been teaching myself Danish (a little) and this rings true to me. Mostly Danish feels like English but with different pronunciation, and occasional non-cognates. Danish certainly feels closer to modern English than German does.
anthonyu 14y ago
It's an interesting argument; however I am a little dissuaded by the fact that half of the support for the claims of similar syntax between Norwegian and English (split infinitives and placing a preposition at the end of a sentence) are generally considered poor grammar in English.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  They're considered "poor grammar" for historical reasons (mainly because they're impossible in Latin), not because they are not understood (compare to "I the dog kick" which is ungrammatical in a much more rigorous sense). From a linguistic standpoint what's interesting is what is understood and what isn't, not what is the most proper.
- mc32 14y ago
  Those protests were popularized by grammarians who learned grammar thru a Latin lens, so, to them, being used to the Latin grammar, this construct in English looked incorrect. From a Germanic language context, though, it's perfectly normal.
- nollidge 14y ago
  They're not poor grammar at all, since grammar is determined by the consensus of the speakers, and they have spoken (so to speak).
bitops 14y ago
I am a native Danish speaker (my first language) and this article definitely rings true to me. I wouldn't go so far as to say that English is a Scandinavian language proper, but it was very easy to learn growing up. Even as a kid growing up in Denmark, with all the British/American shows on TV (not dubbed) it was easy to learn a lot just by reading subtitles and following along. I give Saturday morning cartoon re-runs a lot of credit for helping me to learn. I remember sitting on a train with a friend of mine and us both realizing that we both knew a lot of English a year before we were going to start learning it in school. I've found that most Scandinavians (or at least Danes) have a pretty easy time with English. Because the sentence structures are so similar, you're mostly plugging in English words that you're already familiar with and using the same sentence. That said, on a deeper level, English is a very different language. That's most likely because it is such a cross between other languages.
- vonbladet 14y ago
  again, the speakers of dutch (west germanic) have exactly the same experience, even though the article claims the grammar is shockingly different. as a native english speaker, my experience in dutch & swedish classes has been that it's pretty much a wash between them for difficulty, so frankly i think this argument goes nowhere. (yes, dutch puts verbs at the end of subclauses. but 'Wegian puts articles at the end of nouns and has a funky medio-passive, so then where are you?)
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  While the similarities between Danish and English no doubt helped you, I think the fact that Denmark is a small country and so has less in the way of domestic media is equally important. You were exposed to English at an early age because it doesn't make economic sense to dub cartoons into a language with as few native speakers as Danish.
  - bitops 14y ago
    I'm personally not so sure. Because Denmark is a small country, it's a much closer-knit community than, say, the US. I grew up with a lot of Danish-created media, and paid as much attention to that as I did English-based media. Any Danish kid born in the 80's (myself included) more likely than not has fond memories of watching "Bamses Billedbog" at 6pm on the weekends. Also, plenty of cartoons are dubbed into Danish, so I'm not totally convinced about the economic argument. Denmark is a rich country with plenty of money to spend.
kmfrk 14y ago
Can I just say on a related note that I'm chuffed to bits to see interesting linguistics stories make it to the frontpage? No linkbait, no inane Silicon Valley inside baseball, and all that usual stuff.
- knackers 14y ago
  I agree with your sentiment. My concern is that this is essentially academic linkbait :P
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Fair enough, I don't disagree entirely. ;)
- petercooper 14y ago
  If you're interested in this sort of thing, http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics is worth subscribing to also. One of the better sub-Reddits.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Subscribed a long time ago. :) But yeah, it's probably one of the best subreddits I subscribe to.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  > no inane Silicon Valley inside baseball I think that a lot of this does have value to people on this site. If you're going to be involved in the SV community, it's important to stay up-to-date on the "inside baseball".
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    Though you have to admit that a lot of the conversation in SV sounds like a lot like armchair quarterbacking, and is about as relevant...
sramsay 14y ago
I didn't study linguistics, but I'm an English professor and my first thought was of Beowulf -- an Anglo-Saxon poem that takes place entirely in Scandinavia. Grendel, in fact, lives in Denmark.
Svip 14y ago
Estonians have an easy time too,[1] learning English apparently. So clearly English is also a Finno-Ugric language. [1] Based on the fact that almost all Estonian youth (16 - 26 years old) can speak English properly.
- Svip 14y ago
  But being serious for a moment: Wasn't it during Old English that English was mostly heavily influenced by Old Norse? Who can forget the Norwegian, Danish and Jutes' invasions? As an example, just look at Beowulf, famous for being a work in Old English. In this link, the author highlights that Old English uses the Dutch/German approach to sentence structure. (Although, a “Ich lese das Buch” / 'I read the book' / »Jeg læser bogen« structure is also possible in German.) But Middle English is actually mostly heavily influenced by French (1066 and all that), and surprise surprise, French also uses a SVO (subject verb object) structure, « je lis le livre ». Maybe he should have used better examples. ---- Edit: German grammar.
- timc3 14y ago
  Do you have access to a wide range of media in English that isn't dubbed or translated from an early age?
  - Svip 14y ago
    Oh, I am not Estonian. But Estonian television is not dubbed, merely subtitled. I just don't believe that 'X population is generally good at speaking Y language' means that 'X's mother tongue is related to Y' is a sound argument.
BjoernKW 14y ago
Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages, all of which share the same Indo-European roots. Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to some extent. You'll find salient features of any of these language roots but that doesn't make English a Romance or Gaelic language for instance, it's just that it has been influenced by those and hence adopted grammatical features. The main reason for this is that Great Britain before the times of the British Empire was one of the most contested places in Europe. Finally, some of the claims in this article are somewhat inaccurate. There were no Scandinavians and British people at that time, 'Danes' and 'Anglo-Saxons' would have been the correct terms. I also have a problem with the claim that Norwegians find it easy to learn English because their languages are so closely related. The same has been said about Dutch not long ago.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  Dutch and Norwegian are also closely related. It would be surprising if there weren't transitivity there—and IIRC there are examples where the relationship doesn't hold in both directions. I remember reading somewhere that Dutch speakers have an easier time understanding German than vice versa, despite both being similar.
  - timc3 14y ago
    There was a lot of trade between the two countries for some time. Norwegians would travel around to Bergen or other coastal towns on the west coast and then would trade with the Dutch and the Germans.
    - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
mcmire 14y ago
So if English is derived from Middle English which arose when the existing inhabitants of the British Isles took on the language of the newly arrived Scandinavians... where did Old English come from?
- ricardobeat 14y ago
  Second paragraph: Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century.
  - timc3 14y ago
    Actually its still not 100% understood and still being studied
teyc 14y ago
I'm of Chinese descent watching my children grow up in Australia is interesting. While they speak Chinese, they tend to think in English. This means that their sentence structure is totally messed up (from a Chinese standpoint). Perhaps a similar thing happened in England. The vocabulary is Germanic, but the syntax is Norse.
- stan_rogers 14y ago
  A better way to put it is that the syntax is neither. There was that whole Danelaw episode to mess up the grammar. Along with word borrowings (which are pretty much inevitable when an adult population--the Viking settlers--is forced into something of a pidgin situation with a related language), there is going to be some damage done to word order and endings/affixes. And since both Old English (or, rather, the Old Englishes--there were regional differences among the Angle-, Saxon- and Jute-dominated areas), a set of languages very much like Old Frisian, and Old Norse were card-carrying Germanic languages with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary and the gender assignments didn't align well with each other, grammar simplified. The characteristic German habit of postponing verbs under various circumstances (which also differed between languages) gave way to a more streamlined and generally more consistent SVO. Gender was pretty much abandoned for words that didn't denote things having an actual sex. (Afrikaans underwent a very similar simplification under very different circumstances.) Rather than speaking English words in a Norse grammatical framework, people were speaking a mixture of English and Norse words in a common framework, avoiding the difficult subtleties of either language. But I'd imagine that the children of those Norse settlers (who probably had native British mothers) thought in the hybrid and spoke neither parent's language perfectly. Mainland Scandinavian languages have also simplified somewhat, but in the time since native Norse speakers had a direct influence on English. The Danes that occupied northern Great Britain spoke something that looks and sounds a lot more like Icelandic or Faroese than modern Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. To suggest that the simplification of grammar in mainland Scandinavia after the Norman invasion of Britain is the reason for English's current structure is to posit a sort of quantum entanglement between languages. Correlation is not causation. I still hear mostly English (highly dialectical English, but English of England nonetheless) when I listen to recordings of modern Frisian. I hear something merely related to English when I listen to Scandinavian languages.
stcredzero 14y ago
This is why we think German and Dutch to sound quaint and love the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.
kylebgorman 14y ago
It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. You can strand prepositions (or verb particles, as we'd call them when they're not heads of clauses) in final position in German, contrary to their claim: Er stellt es auf "he sets it up". Off the top of my head I can name many ways that Scandinavian and English differ syntactically (forgive the jargon: you can Google it). 1) Many Scandinavian languages maintain a form of V2, where tensed main verb appears in 2nd position (defined syntactically); English lost it in the Middle English period. 2) Scandinavian lacks do-support (the presence of a dummy tensed auxiliary in certain contexts: "I don't want it", "Do you know?", etc.) where English has it. 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago.
- dsrguru 14y ago
  > It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. Agreed. An example is Japanese and Korean. They have virtually identical syntax, yet they are completely unrelated genetically. Outside of the vocabulary that they both borrowed from Middle Chinese, they have essentially no words in common.
- dbaupp 14y ago
  A question from someone who has only done a timy bit of linguistics: > 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago. Is this like "Nu ska jag gå" (in Swedish)? If so, I don't understand that English lost it because "Now I will walk" is a fine translation.
  - 14y ago
IanDrake 14y ago
While watching the English subtitled "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I was surprised by how many time I didn't need to read the subtitles. Obviously I'm have no knowledge of linguistics, but maybe there's something to this theory.
curiousdannii 14y ago
This really isn't a sensational claim -- English has long been called a creole! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesi...
oofabz 14y ago
It's not sensational to claim that English is Scandinavian. German and English are both descended from Norse, so they are both Scandinavian if you go back 1500 years. What this linguist is saying is that modern English is more Scandinavian than Old English. But Old English was never spoken throughout the island, back then many British inhabitants spoke Norse! So I am not surprised that over time, they standardized on a language halfway between Old English and Norse. Middle English developed around 1100. Take a look at this map of languages circa 900: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_norse,_ca_900.PNG http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_norse,_ca_900.PNG
- kylebgorman 14y ago
  No, English is not thought to be descended from Norse until this press release: see Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic]. It's thought to be related to the modern Scandinavian languages by a split that occurred around two millennia ago. You're confusing "descended from" and "related to". Linguists, like biologists, draw a distinction between "descent" and "convergent evolution" (with "lateral gene transfer" being like what linguists call "contact-induced change"). [edited to add wiki link]
  - oofabz 14y ago
    Thank you, I stand corrected. I believe they are still both Scandinavian. Proto-Germanic, which all of these languages descended from, was spoken primarily in Denmark and Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language
    - jonsterling 14y ago
      Yeah, but you're still sensationally wrong. PGe may have been spoken in Scandinavia, but that's not even close to what people mean when they say “Scandinavian languages”. That means “North Germanic”, or, languages which are descended from Old Norse. As opposed to every other Germanic language, like German, Frisian, Dutch, Old Saxon, Old English, Gothic, etc.
jonsterling 14y ago
Let's not forget that Old English also puts prepositions at the ends of sentences! That's not a valid argument for a claim of closer affinity toward Scandinavian than Old English.
timc3 14y ago
Almost totally and utterly nonsensical sensationalist link bait, in the fact that languages are far more complicated than just those simple examples. I am English (from near Anglo-Cornish/Somerset area), have lived in Norway (Bergen where they speak mainly Bokmål) and now live in Stockholm (obviously in Sweden, where they speak Swedish), and live with and understand the differences, plus I have spent some time learning the history of my mother tongue and the history of those countries. Lets face it the the grammer structure is different, its the first thing an English person has to learn when learning Scandinavian languages. English heavily borrows from other languages. Swedish heavily borrows from French - there was a King who was obsessed with France and everything french, some Norwegian words are from Sweden. English borrows French words heavily for obvious reasons. Bokmål adopted words from those countries that they traded with and he doesn't even expand into the different languages and dialects that used to be in the Norway that Nynorsk tried to consolidate. The fact is that these languages have changed and are constantly changing based on trade, fashion, rule and migration and to singly say that English is a Scandinavian Language is at best trying to make a name for yourself and at worst ignorance of history.
- HaakonKL 14y ago
  > languages > Bergen speaking any form of normal Norwegian > Norwegian words are from Sweden And you just lost any and all credibility you may have once had. You're just wrong.
skrebbel 14y ago
I'm curious, I'm absolutely no expert in the field of linguistics, but it appears that linguists insist that the hierarchy of language families is a strict tree [1]. In OO terms, that there's no multiple inheritance. Really, how unlikely could that be? Why can't English be both North and West Germanic? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family "A family is a monogenetic unit; that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family."
- timc3 14y ago
  Think of it more like plant evolution from seeds that travel far and wide, it might be closer to the truth.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    Um, I don't think I completely understood your analogy. Plants can have multiple parents. Why can't languages?
demetrius 14y ago
The article gives a one-sided. For example, while enumerating the similarities between the Scandinavian languages and English, it fails to enumerate differences (e.g. Scandinavian languages have suffixed articles while English, Old English and German have articles before words). It gives us some examples, but fails to give a large picture (e.g. what is the share of Norse words in the N most frequent words).
- tehwalrus 14y ago
  indeed; smacks of cherry picking. I would also have liked to see those stats compared with the same ones for German, since that was also part of the hypothesis.
arethuza 14y ago
I grew up in a part of the mainland UK that is closest to Scandinavia - North East Scotland and as a child (at least out of school) spoke in the thick local dialect known as Doric. I was highly amused when someone pointed out the Norwegian terms for hospital and vacuum cleaner - støvsuger and sykehus are pretty much exactly how you would say "dust sucker" - "stoor sooker" and "sick house" - "seek hoos". Hardly surprising when you consider that considerable chunks of Scotland were part of Norway for a while (although not the part where I grew up, although there are quite a few battles in the area between Scots and Vikings).
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 14y ago
  My mother's family are all from the Durham area and Norwegians speaking English all sound like they have an North-East accent to me. My grandmother now calls my daughters the bairns, pigs were always swine, etc. One of my mother's cultural touchstones as a child was the 'Oor Wullie' and 'The Broons' comics, which are actually scottish but close enough to NE English for her as a child to consider it part of her cultural sphere. Now clearly my grandparents and family from that region all speak English, but it's quite different from the English spoken in SE London where I now live, so my daughters are picking up a cockney/Kentish dialect that's very much more West German. So I don't think it makes a lot of sense to say that English is more this, or more that. It reduces down to saying that more people in England live in regions influenced by language family X than live in regions influenced by language family Y. But they all are speaking English.
- recoil 14y ago
  I also grew up in Scotland. At one point I worked with a Swede and was interested to find that many Scots words are closer to their equivalents in Scandinavian languages than they are to those in English. For example, "greet" for "cry" is clearly related to the Norwegian gråte or Swedish gråta. Likewise "kirk" for "church" is a lot closer to the Norwegian "kirke". These are the only ones I remember off the top of my head, but I remember there being surprisingly many. edit: bairn (Scots) vs barn (Norwegian) for child just came to mind.
hso9791 14y ago
As a Norwegian having lived in English-speaking countries for many years, I find the conclusion plausible, but the evidence lacking. We do share a lot of the same rules for word order as English. There are, however, notable exceptions. For instance, if the sentence starts with another word than the subject, then we swap subject and verb. If we ask a question, then we start with the verb. Of course, this is done with 'to do' in English, and there's a nice, archaic sound to it if one simply place the verb first ("Went you to the store?"). In the sagas it is written that at some point earlier in history, the vikings and the inhabitants of Great Britain (the island) understood each other. With all the wars, conquests and migrations done by people of a similar language, it is hardly strange that one cannot pinpoint exactly what English is. At the time, one may summarize the situation that the Norwegians and Danes were organized(1), as well as the Normans, whereas the inhabitants of Great Britain were less so. The language of power, the courts and records will disproportionately influence the common language. 1) Organized in the sense that they had picked up how to maintain power from the remnants of the Roman empire. Vikings used, among other things, to serve as the imperial guard of Constantinople. edit: removed an asterisk that caused formatting changes

154 points by mikeleeorg 14y ago

this is also on r/linguistics: http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a_scandinavian_language_what_do_you/ http://reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13vn3j/english_is_a...

jfaucett 14y ago

interesting article. This assertion does go against the last 200 years or so (since the Grimm Brothers) of thought about the origins of the English language. I'm not an expert but I did major in linguistics and have studied the history of the english language in some depth. For me, the strongest points this new proposal has are the syntactical features that scandinavian and modern english share. Syntactical features i.e. sentence structure being adopted from one language to another is very very rare and when it does occur it happens at a much slower rate. There are a couple week points in the theory though. #1 and the article admits this, Old English is West Germanic. #2 Chaucer's english is vastly different from Old English but I don't think anyone would say its a completely new Language, there are too many similarities, shared vocabularies, etc, this has until now led everyone to believe modern english discends from old english and was mingled up with scandinavian and then norman french. Also, almost all the syntactical similarities the article shows have to do with the split verb that modern english doesn't have. In german "ich habe gestern lange gearbeitet" is in English literally : "I have yesterday long worked" but translated should be "I worked a long time yesterday" . I think they'd need to give support that the split verb didn't die out, (which is kind of suggested in the texts of chaucer and his predecessors), but rather was something that never existed b/c the "original" language, in this case scandinavian, never had them in the first place.

bitwize 14y ago
Split verbs do actually exist in modern English. Schoolmarms may enphatically teach that they're flat-out wrong, but linguists have long maintained that English rules of grammar are descriptive, not proscriptive. Actual common use is what is considered to fundamentally dictate the rules, not vice-versa.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  I'm not sure, but I think you're confusing split infinitives with split verbs. Split infinitives are definitely a schoolmarm invention (borrowed from Latin, where the infinitive is an inflection and thus inseparable). I think split verbs are here referring to the possibility of separating verbal auxiliaries from their verb.
  - dunham 14y ago
    I think by "split verb" he's referring to "separable verbs", where a particle, resembling a preposition, moves to the end of the sentence. This sometimes occurs in English, apparently violating the "schoolmarm" rule to not end sentences with a preposition. c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  The concept to which you're referring is that linguists describe language without shaping it. Its like saying scientists don't make physics, they observe it. With sociological phenomena the distinction between dictating something and measuring it is finer, but it doesnt mean linguists hate prescriptive grammars.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    I think he means to contrast English with, say, Spanish which has an actual governing, prescriptive body. I googled to find the name of it for you and Wikipedia gave me a much better link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators As a primary English speaker, I find it both silly and abhorrent that they even bother but... eh. Whatever.
fusiongyro 14y ago
Just a question, since my knowledge on this subject is very, very limited, but is it possible that the syntactic changes could be accounted for by a single parameter? From what I recall, _The Atoms of Language_ makes the case that English went from SOV to SVO because a style in which very short sentences could be uttered in SVO arose and became popular, and within a fairly short period of time the L1 learners of English were mostly hearing SVO during their early years, so as they matured the head directionality parameter was set contrary to their parents. As I recall the book had some evidence to support this, but I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm also not sure how that would work with the antisymmetry proposal (which nicely explains other phenomena).
- jfaucett 14y ago
  I haven't read the Atoms of Language but this sounds plausible and is if I remember correctly, more or less, what is believed to have happened. The diachronic study of english from say 900 to 1300, shows a language undergoing drastic changes such as the loss of inflections, grammatical gender, and adoption of north germanic (danish) words and later norman french ones. The idea is that original SOV speakers of saxon were put under the heavy influence of the SVO languages of the danes and later (post 1066 - battle of hastings) that of the SVO normans. It would make sense, especially since even OE was not a truly pure SOV language and allowed a much freer word order due to the inflection system, which upon dying out forced word order to take on a much stricter form. As an interesting side note to show just how big of a hack mixed up jumble of everything modern english is, the usage of the verb do, in elliptical sentences and questions such as "do you want some coffee?", is very rare in indo-european languages (only found in celtic langs such as irish) and thought to have been picked up during the time in which saxon speakers and celts were sharing the same island.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    I find this proposal an interesting thought experiment, for sure, but replacing all the vocabulary except the grammatical words seems more likely to me than replacing just the grammatical words and the grammar and retaining all the other vocabulary. Are there any other cases of the grammatical words being replaced while the rest of the vocab was left intact? The fact that there was so much and such dramatic change happening that either of those possibilities are reasonable suggests to me that we're not going to get a definitive conclusion anytime soon.
sirmarksalot 14y ago
The joke I always heard about split verbs was, "I suppose then to uphold a bank is the same as to hold it up?" Not to say that really contradicts the theory, though, as the single word "uphold" is essentially vocabulary, and could easily have been borrowed from a West Germanic language, irrespective of its grammatical implications.
oellegaard 14y ago
I find the article very interesting being a Dane. Your sentence "I worked a long time yesterday" would be "Jeg arbejde lang tid igår" in modern Danish - exactly the same structure as the English sentence. This applies to most sentences in at least Danish/Norwegian(Bokmål) and English.

tokenadult 14y ago

I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. (I used to live with a roommate during my undergraduate studies who insisted on maintaining a Norwegian-speaking household.) My oldest son the hacker has studied the same languages, as well as Chinese, all of which are family heritage languages for us. I don't buy this press release. English was heavily influenced by Norse, for sure, but at its core it is part of the West Germanic branch of Germanic languages, rather than the North Germanic branch that includes Scandinavian. [Edit to take into account that the source link has been changed, and thus improved, on this submission.]

zeteo 14y ago
>I have studied linguistics, German, and Norwegian. [...] I don't buy this press release. Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple languages [1]. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core vocabulary? [1] Here's the Amazon publications list for one of them: http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08 http://www.amazon.com/Jan-Terje-Faarlund/e/B001HOTQ08
- tokenadult 14y ago
  Apparently this theory's authors have also studied linguistics and multiple languages. So how do you counter their arguments regarding syntax and core vocabulary? So far their publication on the contested point in discussion here is the press release submitted here. The field of linguistics has peer-reviewed journals like any other science, and it has authoritative secondary sources (surveys of world languages) and tertiary sources (encyclopedias of linguistics) and a large scholarly community of people who have more specialized knowledge than (apparently) any participant in this thread, including me, who know English, Old English, modern Scandinavian, Old Norse, and German well enough to dig into the data. What's more, historians have been publishing for generations on the general issue of how Britain was settled by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes after written history had already begun in Britain, and how incursions by "Danes" in Britain were responded to by the local populations. This is not a new field. A new comment, more recently submitted than your reply to my comment, puts the issue well: Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages, all of which share the same Indo-European roots. Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to some extent. That's very familiar to all of us who have formally studied linguistics of English. What's also dismaying familiar to anyone who has studied linguistics is the attempt of nationalists who are partisans of one language or another to claim a connection between their language and some language that enjoys great prestige (here, English). I have nothing against Norwegian. I speak it (a little), and Norwegian was my late grandmother's native language. I have nothing against German. I speak it (rather more than I speak Norwegian), and it was the native language and sole language of schooling for two of my grandparents. I also acknowledge, as I did in my original comment, that BOTH the North Germanic and West Germanic branches of Germanic languages influenced English. My uncontroversial and non-extraordinary claim here, agreed to by most linguists, is simply that the weight of influence on English is such, and the history of English is such, that English is better characterized as a West Germanic language than as a North Germanic language. The most frequently occurring word in English, which is "the," is one demonstration of that. The word "the" is a West Germanic word.

jon6 14y ago

This is the most useless academic 'discovery' I've ever seen. Am I wrong?

acuozzo 14y ago
The number zero was considered useless for a long period of time [1]. A certain piece of academic information isn't useless just because you can't think of a use for it, so I'd say yes, you're wrong. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0140296476/ http://www.amazon.com/Zero-The-Biography-Dangerous-Idea/dp/0...
- smegel 14y ago
  > The number zero was considered useless It still is as far as I can tell. Try adding/subtracting it - it makes no difference. Multiplying it just gets you back the same useless number no matter what. Dividing by zero? Don't even go there!
  - bitops 14y ago
    I can't tell if you're trolling or being willfully ignorant? Zero represents the state of "nothingness" - the universe before anything exists. The blank slate, tabula rasa, etc. The empty page before you write anything it. Zero is a very deep concept and it is far from useless. See the book "Zero: history of a dangerous number".
    - femto 14y ago
      Being funny I think. I'd think it's actually a valid point though, if the question is put in the form: Does zero (or its reciprocal) have any existence beyond being a useful theoretical construct? Can the physical world actually reach zero, or only asymptotically approach it? Is the universe infinitely big? Can infinitely small things exist? Can a thing be said not to exist (ie. we have zero of it), or is there always a miniscule probability of it spontaneously appearing due to quantum effects? Is a vacuum really empty? If we have zero, how do we measure it in the face of quantum uncertainty? And so on... --- Edit: grammar

charonn0 14y ago

Given the location and history of England, English is probably the biggest mutt of the Indo-European family.

kemiller 14y ago
Hindi/Urdu and other subcontinental languages are also Indo-European and their lands have histories and linguistic influences at least as colorful as England's. But English has got to be in the running.

jchrisa 14y ago

I've been teaching myself Danish (a little) and this rings true to me. Mostly Danish feels like English but with different pronunciation, and occasional non-cognates. Danish certainly feels closer to modern English than German does.

anthonyu 14y ago

It's an interesting argument; however I am a little dissuaded by the fact that half of the support for the claims of similar syntax between Norwegian and English (split infinitives and placing a preposition at the end of a sentence) are generally considered poor grammar in English.

fusiongyro 14y ago
They're considered "poor grammar" for historical reasons (mainly because they're impossible in Latin), not because they are not understood (compare to "I the dog kick" which is ungrammatical in a much more rigorous sense). From a linguistic standpoint what's interesting is what is understood and what isn't, not what is the most proper.
mc32 14y ago
Those protests were popularized by grammarians who learned grammar thru a Latin lens, so, to them, being used to the Latin grammar, this construct in English looked incorrect. From a Germanic language context, though, it's perfectly normal.
nollidge 14y ago
They're not poor grammar at all, since grammar is determined by the consensus of the speakers, and they have spoken (so to speak).

bitops 14y ago

I am a native Danish speaker (my first language) and this article definitely rings true to me. I wouldn't go so far as to say that English is a Scandinavian language proper, but it was very easy to learn growing up. Even as a kid growing up in Denmark, with all the British/American shows on TV (not dubbed) it was easy to learn a lot just by reading subtitles and following along. I give Saturday morning cartoon re-runs a lot of credit for helping me to learn. I remember sitting on a train with a friend of mine and us both realizing that we both knew a lot of English a year before we were going to start learning it in school. I've found that most Scandinavians (or at least Danes) have a pretty easy time with English. Because the sentence structures are so similar, you're mostly plugging in English words that you're already familiar with and using the same sentence. That said, on a deeper level, English is a very different language. That's most likely because it is such a cross between other languages.

vonbladet 14y ago
again, the speakers of dutch (west germanic) have exactly the same experience, even though the article claims the grammar is shockingly different. as a native english speaker, my experience in dutch & swedish classes has been that it's pretty much a wash between them for difficulty, so frankly i think this argument goes nowhere. (yes, dutch puts verbs at the end of subclauses. but 'Wegian puts articles at the end of nouns and has a funky medio-passive, so then where are you?)
w1ntermute 14y ago
While the similarities between Danish and English no doubt helped you, I think the fact that Denmark is a small country and so has less in the way of domestic media is equally important. You were exposed to English at an early age because it doesn't make economic sense to dub cartoons into a language with as few native speakers as Danish.
- bitops 14y ago
  I'm personally not so sure. Because Denmark is a small country, it's a much closer-knit community than, say, the US. I grew up with a lot of Danish-created media, and paid as much attention to that as I did English-based media. Any Danish kid born in the 80's (myself included) more likely than not has fond memories of watching "Bamses Billedbog" at 6pm on the weekends. Also, plenty of cartoons are dubbed into Danish, so I'm not totally convinced about the economic argument. Denmark is a rich country with plenty of money to spend.

kmfrk 14y ago

Can I just say on a related note that I'm chuffed to bits to see interesting linguistics stories make it to the frontpage? No linkbait, no inane Silicon Valley inside baseball, and all that usual stuff.

knackers 14y ago
I agree with your sentiment. My concern is that this is essentially academic linkbait :P
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Fair enough, I don't disagree entirely. ;)
petercooper 14y ago
If you're interested in this sort of thing, http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics is worth subscribing to also. One of the better sub-Reddits.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Subscribed a long time ago. :) But yeah, it's probably one of the best subreddits I subscribe to.
w1ntermute 14y ago
> no inane Silicon Valley inside baseball I think that a lot of this does have value to people on this site. If you're going to be involved in the SV community, it's important to stay up-to-date on the "inside baseball".
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  Though you have to admit that a lot of the conversation in SV sounds like a lot like armchair quarterbacking, and is about as relevant...

sramsay 14y ago

I didn't study linguistics, but I'm an English professor and my first thought was of Beowulf -- an Anglo-Saxon poem that takes place entirely in Scandinavia. Grendel, in fact, lives in Denmark.

Svip 14y ago

Estonians have an easy time too,[1] learning English apparently. So clearly English is also a Finno-Ugric language. [1] Based on the fact that almost all Estonian youth (16 - 26 years old) can speak English properly.

Svip 14y ago
But being serious for a moment: Wasn't it during Old English that English was mostly heavily influenced by Old Norse? Who can forget the Norwegian, Danish and Jutes' invasions? As an example, just look at Beowulf, famous for being a work in Old English. In this link, the author highlights that Old English uses the Dutch/German approach to sentence structure. (Although, a “Ich lese das Buch” / 'I read the book' / »Jeg læser bogen« structure is also possible in German.) But Middle English is actually mostly heavily influenced by French (1066 and all that), and surprise surprise, French also uses a SVO (subject verb object) structure, « je lis le livre ». Maybe he should have used better examples. ---- Edit: German grammar.
timc3 14y ago
Do you have access to a wide range of media in English that isn't dubbed or translated from an early age?
- Svip 14y ago
  Oh, I am not Estonian. But Estonian television is not dubbed, merely subtitled. I just don't believe that 'X population is generally good at speaking Y language' means that 'X's mother tongue is related to Y' is a sound argument.

BjoernKW 14y ago

Having studied linguistics I'd say the claim is sensationalist rather than sensational. English is a rather wild crossbreed of many European languages, all of which share the same Indo-European roots. Old English is very closely related to Old Frisian and Low German. Later on English has been heavily influenced by Scandinavian, Romance (mainly French due the Norman invasion in 1066 - Norman French to be specific, which differed quite a bit from Île-de-France French at that time) and Gaelic languages to some extent. You'll find salient features of any of these language roots but that doesn't make English a Romance or Gaelic language for instance, it's just that it has been influenced by those and hence adopted grammatical features. The main reason for this is that Great Britain before the times of the British Empire was one of the most contested places in Europe. Finally, some of the claims in this article are somewhat inaccurate. There were no Scandinavians and British people at that time, 'Danes' and 'Anglo-Saxons' would have been the correct terms. I also have a problem with the claim that Norwegians find it easy to learn English because their languages are so closely related. The same has been said about Dutch not long ago.

fusiongyro 14y ago
Dutch and Norwegian are also closely related. It would be surprising if there weren't transitivity there—and IIRC there are examples where the relationship doesn't hold in both directions. I remember reading somewhere that Dutch speakers have an easier time understanding German than vice versa, despite both being similar.
- timc3 14y ago
  There was a lot of trade between the two countries for some time. Norwegians would travel around to Bergen or other coastal towns on the west coast and then would trade with the Dutch and the Germans.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

mcmire 14y ago

So if English is derived from Middle English which arose when the existing inhabitants of the British Isles took on the language of the newly arrived Scandinavians... where did Old English come from?

ricardobeat 14y ago
Second paragraph: Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century.
- timc3 14y ago
  Actually its still not 100% understood and still being studied

teyc 14y ago

I'm of Chinese descent watching my children grow up in Australia is interesting. While they speak Chinese, they tend to think in English. This means that their sentence structure is totally messed up (from a Chinese standpoint). Perhaps a similar thing happened in England. The vocabulary is Germanic, but the syntax is Norse.

stan_rogers 14y ago
A better way to put it is that the syntax is neither. There was that whole Danelaw episode to mess up the grammar. Along with word borrowings (which are pretty much inevitable when an adult population--the Viking settlers--is forced into something of a pidgin situation with a related language), there is going to be some damage done to word order and endings/affixes. And since both Old English (or, rather, the Old Englishes--there were regional differences among the Angle-, Saxon- and Jute-dominated areas), a set of languages very much like Old Frisian, and Old Norse were card-carrying Germanic languages with grammatical gender, which is largely arbitrary and the gender assignments didn't align well with each other, grammar simplified. The characteristic German habit of postponing verbs under various circumstances (which also differed between languages) gave way to a more streamlined and generally more consistent SVO. Gender was pretty much abandoned for words that didn't denote things having an actual sex. (Afrikaans underwent a very similar simplification under very different circumstances.) Rather than speaking English words in a Norse grammatical framework, people were speaking a mixture of English and Norse words in a common framework, avoiding the difficult subtleties of either language. But I'd imagine that the children of those Norse settlers (who probably had native British mothers) thought in the hybrid and spoke neither parent's language perfectly. Mainland Scandinavian languages have also simplified somewhat, but in the time since native Norse speakers had a direct influence on English. The Danes that occupied northern Great Britain spoke something that looks and sounds a lot more like Icelandic or Faroese than modern Danish, Swedish or Norwegian. To suggest that the simplification of grammar in mainland Scandinavia after the Norman invasion of Britain is the reason for English's current structure is to posit a sort of quantum entanglement between languages. Correlation is not causation. I still hear mostly English (highly dialectical English, but English of England nonetheless) when I listen to recordings of modern Frisian. I hear something merely related to English when I listen to Scandinavian languages.

stcredzero 14y ago

This is why we think German and Dutch to sound quaint and love the Swedish Chef from the Muppets.

kylebgorman 14y ago

It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. You can strand prepositions (or verb particles, as we'd call them when they're not heads of clauses) in final position in German, contrary to their claim: Er stellt es auf "he sets it up". Off the top of my head I can name many ways that Scandinavian and English differ syntactically (forgive the jargon: you can Google it). 1) Many Scandinavian languages maintain a form of V2, where tensed main verb appears in 2nd position (defined syntactically); English lost it in the Middle English period. 2) Scandinavian lacks do-support (the presence of a dummy tensed auxiliary in certain contexts: "I don't want it", "Do you know?", etc.) where English has it. 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago.

dsrguru 14y ago
> It's just not true that syntactic borrowing is that uncommon (google it). That means that the historically documented prolonged contact between Scandinavians and the English had some effect on the grammar. No surprise there. Since syntactic borrowing is not uncommon in contact situations, it's a bad way to tell what language is descended from what other languages, so this proposal isn't off to a good start. Agreed. An example is Japanese and Korean. They have virtually identical syntax, yet they are completely unrelated genetically. Outside of the vocabulary that they both borrowed from Middle Chinese, they have essentially no words in common.
dbaupp 14y ago
A question from someone who has only done a timy bit of linguistics: > 3) Some Scandinavian languages have V-to-T movement (where temporal adverbs occur before verbs); English lost that a long time ago. Is this like "Nu ska jag gå" (in Swedish)? If so, I don't understand that English lost it because "Now I will walk" is a fine translation.
- 14y ago

IanDrake 14y ago

While watching the English subtitled "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" I was surprised by how many time I didn't need to read the subtitles. Obviously I'm have no knowledge of linguistics, but maybe there's something to this theory.

curiousdannii 14y ago

This really isn't a sensational claim -- English has long been called a creole! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesi...

oofabz 14y ago

It's not sensational to claim that English is Scandinavian. German and English are both descended from Norse, so they are both Scandinavian if you go back 1500 years. What this linguist is saying is that modern English is more Scandinavian than Old English. But Old English was never spoken throughout the island, back then many British inhabitants spoke Norse! So I am not surprised that over time, they standardized on a language halfway between Old English and Norse. Middle English developed around 1100. Take a look at this map of languages circa 900: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_norse,_ca_900.PNG http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Old_norse,_ca_900.PNG

kylebgorman 14y ago
No, English is not thought to be descended from Norse until this press release: see Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Diachronic]. It's thought to be related to the modern Scandinavian languages by a split that occurred around two millennia ago. You're confusing "descended from" and "related to". Linguists, like biologists, draw a distinction between "descent" and "convergent evolution" (with "lateral gene transfer" being like what linguists call "contact-induced change"). [edited to add wiki link]
- oofabz 14y ago
  Thank you, I stand corrected. I believe they are still both Scandinavian. Proto-Germanic, which all of these languages descended from, was spoken primarily in Denmark and Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language
  - jonsterling 14y ago
    Yeah, but you're still sensationally wrong. PGe may have been spoken in Scandinavia, but that's not even close to what people mean when they say “Scandinavian languages”. That means “North Germanic”, or, languages which are descended from Old Norse. As opposed to every other Germanic language, like German, Frisian, Dutch, Old Saxon, Old English, Gothic, etc.

jonsterling 14y ago

Let's not forget that Old English also puts prepositions at the ends of sentences! That's not a valid argument for a claim of closer affinity toward Scandinavian than Old English.

timc3 14y ago

Almost totally and utterly nonsensical sensationalist link bait, in the fact that languages are far more complicated than just those simple examples. I am English (from near Anglo-Cornish/Somerset area), have lived in Norway (Bergen where they speak mainly Bokmål) and now live in Stockholm (obviously in Sweden, where they speak Swedish), and live with and understand the differences, plus I have spent some time learning the history of my mother tongue and the history of those countries. Lets face it the the grammer structure is different, its the first thing an English person has to learn when learning Scandinavian languages. English heavily borrows from other languages. Swedish heavily borrows from French - there was a King who was obsessed with France and everything french, some Norwegian words are from Sweden. English borrows French words heavily for obvious reasons. Bokmål adopted words from those countries that they traded with and he doesn't even expand into the different languages and dialects that used to be in the Norway that Nynorsk tried to consolidate. The fact is that these languages have changed and are constantly changing based on trade, fashion, rule and migration and to singly say that English is a Scandinavian Language is at best trying to make a name for yourself and at worst ignorance of history.

HaakonKL 14y ago
> languages > Bergen speaking any form of normal Norwegian > Norwegian words are from Sweden And you just lost any and all credibility you may have once had. You're just wrong.

skrebbel 14y ago

I'm curious, I'm absolutely no expert in the field of linguistics, but it appears that linguists insist that the hierarchy of language families is a strict tree [1]. In OO terms, that there's no multiple inheritance. Really, how unlikely could that be? Why can't English be both North and West Germanic? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family "A family is a monogenetic unit; that is, all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all attested descendants of that ancestor are included in the family."

timc3 14y ago
Think of it more like plant evolution from seeds that travel far and wide, it might be closer to the truth.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  Um, I don't think I completely understood your analogy. Plants can have multiple parents. Why can't languages?

demetrius 14y ago

The article gives a one-sided. For example, while enumerating the similarities between the Scandinavian languages and English, it fails to enumerate differences (e.g. Scandinavian languages have suffixed articles while English, Old English and German have articles before words). It gives us some examples, but fails to give a large picture (e.g. what is the share of Norse words in the N most frequent words).

tehwalrus 14y ago
indeed; smacks of cherry picking. I would also have liked to see those stats compared with the same ones for German, since that was also part of the hypothesis.

arethuza 14y ago

I grew up in a part of the mainland UK that is closest to Scandinavia - North East Scotland and as a child (at least out of school) spoke in the thick local dialect known as Doric. I was highly amused when someone pointed out the Norwegian terms for hospital and vacuum cleaner - støvsuger and sykehus are pretty much exactly how you would say "dust sucker" - "stoor sooker" and "sick house" - "seek hoos". Hardly surprising when you consider that considerable chunks of Scotland were part of Norway for a while (although not the part where I grew up, although there are quite a few battles in the area between Scots and Vikings).

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
simonh 14y ago
My mother's family are all from the Durham area and Norwegians speaking English all sound like they have an North-East accent to me. My grandmother now calls my daughters the bairns, pigs were always swine, etc. One of my mother's cultural touchstones as a child was the 'Oor Wullie' and 'The Broons' comics, which are actually scottish but close enough to NE English for her as a child to consider it part of her cultural sphere. Now clearly my grandparents and family from that region all speak English, but it's quite different from the English spoken in SE London where I now live, so my daughters are picking up a cockney/Kentish dialect that's very much more West German. So I don't think it makes a lot of sense to say that English is more this, or more that. It reduces down to saying that more people in England live in regions influenced by language family X than live in regions influenced by language family Y. But they all are speaking English.
recoil 14y ago
I also grew up in Scotland. At one point I worked with a Swede and was interested to find that many Scots words are closer to their equivalents in Scandinavian languages than they are to those in English. For example, "greet" for "cry" is clearly related to the Norwegian gråte or Swedish gråta. Likewise "kirk" for "church" is a lot closer to the Norwegian "kirke". These are the only ones I remember off the top of my head, but I remember there being surprisingly many. edit: bairn (Scots) vs barn (Norwegian) for child just came to mind.

hso9791 14y ago

As a Norwegian having lived in English-speaking countries for many years, I find the conclusion plausible, but the evidence lacking. We do share a lot of the same rules for word order as English. There are, however, notable exceptions. For instance, if the sentence starts with another word than the subject, then we swap subject and verb. If we ask a question, then we start with the verb. Of course, this is done with 'to do' in English, and there's a nice, archaic sound to it if one simply place the verb first ("Went you to the store?"). In the sagas it is written that at some point earlier in history, the vikings and the inhabitants of Great Britain (the island) understood each other. With all the wars, conquests and migrations done by people of a similar language, it is hardly strange that one cannot pinpoint exactly what English is. At the time, one may summarize the situation that the Norwegians and Danes were organized(1), as well as the Normans, whereas the inhabitants of Great Britain were less so. The language of power, the courts and records will disproportionately influence the common language. 1) Organized in the sense that they had picked up how to maintain power from the remnants of the Roman empire. Vikings used, among other things, to serve as the imperial guard of Constantinople. edit: removed an asterisk that caused formatting changes