Scandinavian languages

[Adam Hyllested]

On Fri, 9 Apr 1999, Larry Trask wrote:

> Norwegian and Icelandic "started off" as
> particularly closely related within Scandinavian, but 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 (often together with Faroese) is off at one separate branch
> for itself.

Then take a glance at my tree (upside-down).

          NORDIC LANGUAGES
WEST NORDIC                  EAST NORDIC
            Old Norse (+)                *Old East Nordic (+)
  Icelandic                           Swedish
    Faroese                Gutnish (+)
      Norn (+)              Danish
        Norwegian          Norwegian    (Nynorsk)        (Bokmål)

It should be noted that there are (at least) two standard varieties of
written Norwegian: Nynorsk, which is a mixture of the original West
Nordic dialects, and Bokmål, which is essentially written Danish with some
West Nordic features (and pronounced in a Norwegian way).
One of the main criteria for classifying the modern Nordic languages is
their treatment of the original diphthongs, which are monophthongized in
East Nordic, but retained in West Nordic.: compare Nynorsk <køyra>
'drive' to Bokmål and Danish <køre> '(to) drive'. However, overlapping
isoglosses create fluid borderlines between the varieties, and in many
cases even standard Bokmål retains old diphthongs: compare Nynorsk and
Bokmål <øy> to Danish <ø> 'island'.

> 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.

To me, that doesn't make sense. The genetic classification of languages is
based on origins, not on linguistic similarities caused by later foreign
influence. A Germanic language stays Germanic forever, no matter how
unrecognizeable it may have become. The leaves of a family language tree
simply cannot move from one branch to another. Problems in family-tree
classification occur, however, in cases of some pidgin languages with
roots in two (or more) language groups, or in cases of "mixed languages"
where the antecedents, including the direction of influence, remain
unclear.

Adam Hyllested