My master's thesis is titled, "The Linguistic Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland," which should put it in contention for winning the Scholarly Research With The Least Practical Applications Award.
Even so, I still think it's a pretty interesting topic. My contention was that the topography of the two countries are a big part of the reason that their languages, Old English and Old Gaelic respectively, were affected so differently. England, with its largely level countryside and a networked road system even back then, adopted hundreds of Old Norse borrow-words into every lexical category, even though the explicit rule by Scandinavia (the "Danelaw") was confined to the eastern half of the country and only lasted two centuries. Hundreds of place names in England are Norse in origin; any town ending in "-by" owes that part of its name to the Norse word for "town." (Similarly. places ending in -thorpe, -thwaite, -foss, -toft, or -ness reflect a Norse influence; and all the streets in the city of York that end in -gate -- well, gata is Old Norse for "street.")
The usual pattern is that languages borrow words for concepts they didn't already have covered, but Old English saw Norse supersede even perfectly good native words that were in wide use. The result is that Modern English has way more words of Norse origin than you might expect, including many in the common, everyday vocabulary. A few examples of the more than two hundred documented Norse borrow-words:
- window
- gift
- sky
- egg
- scare
- scream
- anger
- awkward
- fellow
Even the pronoun "they" is Norse in origin; the Old English words for "he," "she," and "they," hé, híe, and héo, respectively, were pronounced so much alike that it could be confusing knowing who you were talking about. The practical English fixed this by palatalizing híe to she and adopting the Norse third-person plural pronoun ∂eira as our modern "they" and "their."
Gaelic, though, responded differently. Scotland was (and is) rugged terrain, and the big settlements tended to be clustered around the coast and inland waterways. Even though Scandinavian rule in Scotland lasted much longer -- Norwegian rule of the Hebrides didn't end until 1266 -- the influence on the language was minor, and largely restricted to place names (the -ey found in the names of lots of the islands of Scotland simply means "island" in Old Norse) and terms related to living near water. The Gaelic words for net, sail, anchor, boat, ford, delta, beach, seagull, seaweed, and skiff are all Norse in origin, but of the common vocabulary, only a few are (including the words for noise, shoe, guide, time, and scatter).
[Nota bene: The Orkneys were a different matter entirely. Norse rule in the Orkneys continued until 1472, and the people there actually lost Gaelic altogether. Until the eighteenth century the main language was Norn, a dialect of West Norse, at which point it was superseded by the Orcadian dialect of Scots English. The last native speaker of Norn died in 1850.]
Of course, English is an amalgam of a great many languages; not only did the Vikings leave their thumbprint on it, but the Normans in the eleventh century brought in a great many words of French origin. Additionally, a lot of our technical vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek. Until the eighteenth century, English was kind of a backwater language spoken only by people in one corner of Europe, so when scientists and other academics from different countries were communicating, they usually did so in Latin. The result is that we still have a ton of Latin and Greek borrow-words in English, including most of our scientific, legal, and scholarly vocabulary. To demonstrate how dependent the sciences are on Latin and Greek roots, the brilliant science fiction author Poul Anderson wrote a piece on the atomic theory using only words native to Old English -- and the result ("Uncleftish Beholding") sounds like some ancient mythological tale, and gives you an idea of just how much Latin and Greek have influenced the cadence of our language. Here's a short excerpt to give the flavor, but you really should read the whole thing, because it's just that wonderful:
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*. These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
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