LL-L "Language contacts" 2003.09.17 (11) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 17.SEP.2003 (11) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Helge Tietz <helgetietz at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language contacts" 2003.09.17 (05) [E]

Dear Lowlanders,

It is certainly true that Low Saxon had a large impact
on Swedish in medieval times due to the power of the
Hanseatic League, even Estonian and Latvian are
heavily influenced by it. To this day you find a tower
in Tallinn called "Kiek in de Kök", well, I don´t
think I need to translate the meaning of it. But when
I refer to the Danish and partly Swedish/Norwegian
influence on English grammar I am talking of the
Viking age which brought beside raids also a lot of
peaceful Scandinavian settlers to Britain which in my
eyes are responsible for those grammatacial changes
which, i return, made English drifting away from
Frisian, Dutch and Low Saxon. The Hanseatic League
appeared about 300 years later and though it had a
huge impact on the languages around the Baltic Sea it
stopped short of Britain. Therefore, before the
Hanseatic League influenced Danish and Swedish those
languages influenced English in the Viking age. But it
is in the nature of languages that they are always
changing due to whatever influences and fashions. In
our family we call the church "de kark" but now many
Low Saxon speakers in Wistedh (Hohenwestedt, Kr.
Rendsborg) call it "de kirch", obviously influenced by
High German. But perhaps it might change again, Hebrew
has been revived to be the spoken language of Israel
and Innuit is making rapid grounds to become the
language of all affairs in Greenland.

Gröeten ut Utrecht, Nederland

Helge

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From: R. F. Hahn <lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net>
Subject: Language contacts

Helge,

I think you are making a really interesting and valuable point in drawing
our attention to pre-Saxonization Scandinavian (which was closer to today's
Icelandic and Faeroese) as a major player, besides Norman French, in the
process of alienating English and Scots from their West Germanic sister
languages.

We know that Scandinavian exerted a lot of lexical influences on English and
Scots, and I can also see that there may be syntactic influences.  What
about morphological influences, though?  Surely, the Scandinavian varieties
of the day were still rather complex in this regard.

And, by the way, what caused the vast morphological simplification in
Scandinavian?  Lowlands Saxon?  Or is it that whenever two languages get
"mixed" that structural simplification inevitably occurs, irrespective of
the inherent degree of structural complexity of the participating languages
(in this case English + French, English + Norse, Norse + Saxon)?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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