Discuss
the nature and extent of the Scandinavian influence on the English Language.
Aside from Greek, Latin and French, only
Scandinavian, the language of the people of whom the Anglo Saxons called
‘Danes’ has made a really substantial contribution to the English vocabulary.
The Scandinavian (Scandinavia, today’s Norway, Sweden and Denmark:
Scandinavian invaders are known as Vikings) colonization of the
British Isles had a considerable effect on the English language and
vocabulary, as well as culture. The similarity between old English and the language of
the Scandinavian invaders makes it at times very difficult to decide whether a
given word in Modern English is a native or a borrowed word. Enormous similarity is found
between these two languages in nouns like ‘man’, ‘wife’, ‘father’,
‘folk’, ‘mother’, ‘house’, ‘life’, ‘winter’, ‘summer’; verbs like ‘will’,
‘can’, ‘meet’, ‘come’, ‘bring’, ‘hear’, ‘see’, ‘think’, ‘smile’, ‘ride’, ‘spin’;
and adjectives and adverbs like ‘full’, ‘wise’, ‘better’, ‘best’,
‘mine’, ‘over’ and ‘under’. In addition, very interesting to note that when we
work with Scandinavian loan words, the word ‘loan’ itself seems to
declare its descent from the Scandinavian.
Scandinavian influence gave a fresh lease of life to
obsolete native words. For instance, the preposition ‘till’ is found only
once or twice in Old English texts
belonging to the pre Scandinavian Period, but after that, it becomes common in
Old English.
Further, some native words lost their
original meaning the moment they encountered their Scandinavian
counterpart. For
example, the word ‘dream’ originally meaning joy changes its meaning into ‘an
experience of viewing images in sleep’, the meaning is derived from
Scandinavian sources. Similarly, ‘bread’ changes its meaning from ‘fragment’ to
‘an item of food’.
