Scandinavian languages

[Larry Trask]

On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

[on the histories of the Scandinavian languages]

> When you speak about the three Nordic languages Norwegian, Swedish and
> Danish, it is necessary to remember that these languages in the period
> between 1350 and 1550 (roughly) were heavily influenced by Platt German.
> The German Hansa ruled the Nordic world, and its influence upon the Nordic
> languages was devastating. It has been estimated that about 35 % of the
> most usual words of everyday communication are derived from Platt (this
> probably goes both for Swedish and Norwegian), and this is the main reason
> why a modern Norwegian can't just pick up his Snorri and read it in the
> original like an Icelander. The situation is therefore a little bit more
> complex than what you suggest in your mail. Since the development of the
> Nordic languages is fairly easy to study, they are excellent examples of
> how a "Wave" can work in language development.

Yes, certainly.  But I wasn't trying to oversimplify the picture.  My
point was simply that Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as
particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but that later
developments brought about a position in which Norwegian is, by any
reasonable standard, linguistically closer to Swedish and Danish than it
is to Icelandic.  Consequently, there is a problem in drawing a family
tree.  Historically, we ought to expect Norwegian and Icelandic to form
a single branch of the tree, but nobody draws it that way: every tree
I've seen puts Norwegian in a branch with Danish and Swedish, while
Icelandic (usually together with Faroese) is off on a separate branch by
itself.

So, to put it crudely but picturesquely, Norwegian has migrated from one
branch of the tree to another.  And this is not the kind of phenomenon
that the family-tree model can accommodate at all well.

Some decades ago, either Trubetzkoy or Jakobson -- I forget which --
suggested that English had ceased to be a Germanic language and become a
Romance language.  Much more recently, C.-J. N. Bailey has likewise
asserted that English is no longer a Germanic language but may perhaps
be a Romance language.  I think these proposals are rather over the top
for English, but they do hint at the potential difficulty faced by the
family-tree model in cases of massive contact and convergence.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk