IE and Substrates and Time

[iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu]

On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Thomas Heffernan wrote:

> 	Although I teach Old English, I do not profess to be a practicing
> linguist rather more of a textual scholar.  However, I am somewhat
> skeptical of the degree of intelligibility claimed for Old Norse, Old
> English and Old High German. If one looks at a very familiar text --  a
> text we know was preached in the churches on Sundays in the vernacular --
> like that of the Parable of the Sower and the Seed in the three languages
> the differences seem considerable enough to preclude immediate
> intelligibility. I would have thought in places like Yorkshire in the late
> 9th century and 10th centuries that long association would more likely
> account for intelligibility. I have selected a line that although it shows
> a number of obvious cognates would still I think present problems for the
> non-native speakers.

> Old Norse reads " En sumt fellr i [th]urra jor[th] ok grjotuga...;
> Old English reads " Sum feoll ofer stanscyligean...;
> Old High German reads: "Andaru fielun in steinahti lant...."

	Yes, but this "Old Norse" you are using is actually
contemporaneous with Middle English, not Old English.  That is a gap of
about four hundred years, which was probably enough to convert
"semi-mutually intelligible" into "mutually unintelligible".

					DLW