26.1053, Books: English: The Language of the Vikings: Emonds, Faarlund

Tue Feb 24 15:05:04 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-1053. Tue Feb 24 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.1053, Books: English: The Language of the Vikings: Emonds, Faarlund

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Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2015 10:04:49
From: Marketa Janebova [marketa.janebova at upol.cz]
Subject: English: The Language of the Vikings: Emonds, Faarlund

Title: English: The Language of the Vikings 
Series Title: Olomouc Modern Language Monographs  

Publication Year: 2014 
Publisher: Department of English and American Studies, Palacky University, Olomouc
	   http://www.anglistika.upol.cz/veda_a_vyzkum/publikace.html

Book URL: http://anglistika.upol.cz/vikings2014/ 

Author: Joseph Embley Emonds
Author: Jan Terje Faarlund

Electronic: ISBN:  9788024443836 Pages:  Price: ----  
Paperback: ISBN:  9788024443829 Pages: 180 Price: ----   Comment: Available upon enquiry

Abstract:

It is well known that Middle English (and its descendant Modern English) acquired many Scandinavian words, even though borrowing from Scandinavian into Old English (OE) was negligible. The heavy borrowing from Scandinavian into Middle English (ME) is conventionally attributed to language contact with Scandinavian settlers in England. However, this alleged borrowing has well known characteristics unlike other large scale borrowing.

a) The borrowed words do not appear in texts (our only hard evidence) during early Scandinavian settlement but only after 1150, when traditional histories of English claim that Scandinavian had died out in England.

b) Most of the borrowed vocabulary refers to daily life concepts for which OE had words, which, along with something like 3/4ths (!?) of OE vocabulary, were lost at about the same time (Ch. 2). 

c) The borrowing was in no way limited to content words, as is the normal case in contact situations; many grammatical morphemes were also borrowed (Ch. 7), including e.g. the majority of ME grammatical verbs.

These unusual properties call for an explanation. 

The book illustrates that also Middle and Modern English syntax is of a Scandinavian rather than a West Germanic (= OE, German, Dutch) type. The bulk of the text treats in turn OE syntactic properties that disappear (Ch. 3), a new, rare construction that appears simultaneously in ME and Old Scandinavian (Ch. 4), Scandinavian properties of ME lacking in OE (Ch. 5), and shared innovations of later English and Scandinavian. Those and other characteristics of ME (e.g., head-initial word order, preposition stranding, split infinitives, post-verbal particles, phrasal genitives, etc.) reflect a deep, typologically significant relation between Scandinavian and ME. This book explains all these facts and patterns by claiming that the linguistic ancestor of Middle/ Modern English is not West Germanic OE but North Germanic. That is, ME descends from (Western) Old Mainland Scandinavian, the newly named “Anglicized Norse.” This ancestor borrowed copiously from the OE lexicon, rather than the o
 ther way around. 

Considering geography, the version of ME widely agreed to be the principal source of standard Early Modern English is that of the East Midlands, which coincides almost exactly with the areas of earlier Scandinavian kingdoms known as the “Danelaw.” The East Midlands “dialect” of ME is thus a continuation of Anglicized Norse (Ch. 1). In contrast, southern/ southwestern “dialects” of ME, last written in the 15th c., bear much closer resemblance to OE proving that OE survived only as these dialects (e.g. in the poem The Owl and the Nightingale). 

Traditional sources often attribute the many syntactic discrepancies between OE and ME to English being hardly written in the 12th c., under the Norman Conquest. However, so many grammatical changes, all in one typological direction and all essentially within a century, are not attested in other similar situations of diachronic change. Moreover, the traditional view has usually ascribed these two dozen changes to “language contact” of OE with Scandinavian. But if Old Norse died out in the 12th c. there was no real intermingling outside the Danelaw of OE and Scandinavian speakers. Thus, the traditional accounts provide no plausible scenario for the transition from Old to Middle English. This book does: the southern population, no doubt after a period of bilingualism, simply switched from OE to Anglicized Norse. By 1300 the change was essentially complete; the language of England was North Germanic. 

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Genetic Classification
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Lexicography
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Typology

Subject Language(s): Dutch (nld)
                     English (eng)
                     English, Middle (enm)
                     English, Old (ang)
                     German (deu)
                     Norse, Old (non)

Language Family(ies): Germanic
                      North Germanic 
                      North Sea Germanic 
                      West Germanic 

Written In: English  (eng)

See this book announcement on our website: 
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=81233

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