Scandinavian languages

[Steven A. Gustafson]

Larry Trask wrote:

> Exactly.  So, based on origins, we'd expect Norwegian to form a branch with
> Icelandic.  Yet all the published trees I've ever seen group Norwegian with
> Danish and Swedish, in defiance of the original state of affairs, but in line
> with modern realities.  I'm not defending any particular analysis here,
> merely pointing to an inadequacy of our family-tree model.

Phonologically, the mainland Scandinavian languages all seem relatively
conservative.  There seems to have been, moreover, a common literary
form of Scandinavian that was in use throughout the entire region during
the "Old Norse" period; of course, this may be an artifact of the fact
that most of the literature from this period that has been preserved for
us, has been preserved in Iceland.

AAR, it may have been that this Common Scandinavian may have kept some
mutual understandability, at least at the "let's go in that house"
level, with other Germanic tongues with which it was in contact, such as
Old English in the north of England, and later, with North German in the
Baltic area.  This served as an anchor that kept the phonology
relatively constant, and relatively close to the parent language ---
even as it wore down the inflection system.  Of course, English borrowed
-pronouns- from Scandinavian; -they, them- and perhaps the long 'u' in
-thou- were apparently taken; and basic words like -give- (instead of
*yive) show profound Scandinavian influence.

Of course, even now, (Bokmel) Norwegian and Swedish are for the most
part mutually understood, and Danish is also understandable with some
difficulty.  Danish (and southern Swedish) have undergone some
phonological innovations not shared by standard Swedish or Norwegian; on
the other hand, the vocabulary of Danish is shared with Norwegian more
than with Swedish.

Interestingly, Icelandic and Ffroese, the "conservative" versions of
Scandinavian, that keep most of the inflectional system and lack the Low
German vocabulary shared by Common Scandinavian, are perhaps the most
phonologically innovative.  Ffroese, especially, being apparently the
most isolated tongue of them all, shows some profound sound changes that
are largely obscured by its archaizing spelling system.  This would seem
to bear out the hypothesis that the mainland Scandinavian languages were
"anchored," not only to one another, but indeed to neighbouring Germanic
speech that was even farther away on the family tree.

It is of course an advantage to have your language understood by your
neighbours, even if they speak a different variety of a related tongue.
I suspect that this mutual intelligibility more or less anchored
Scandinavian, not only to its neighbour North Germanic dialects whose
divergence is largely a matter of political accident, but indeed to some
extent to High German, English, and other West Germanic dialects.

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
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