LL-L: "Language varieties" 10.JUL.2000 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: LL-L: "Language varieties" 09.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

Concerning when Old English and other lowland
languages and Old Norse diverged:

> From: john feather
> [johnfeather at sceptic1.freeserve.co.uk]
> Subject: Language varieties
>
> It seems to me that the idea that a bilingual
> generation grew up in the Danelaw actually
> contradicts the notion of the development of an
> English/Norse hybrid.

The dialects of the Danelaw suggest that most people
in the Danelaw during viking occupation were not
fluently bilingual (thus the focus on bare roots and
the stripping away of the complicated endings). My
point was simply that we'd expect some people to be
blingual.  Such bilinguals ease communication and
hasten the spread of elements of one language to the
other.

> I wanted to ask him about a message he posted back
> in May. He wrote:
>
> >Beowulf was written in Old English (written from
> the 600's till the 1100's), which was indeed a
> Lowland language.  Old English/Old Frisian/Old
> Low German/Old High German/Old Norse were all
> similar, since they'd only been diverging from a
> single language for only 2-4 centuries, whereas
> their modern descendants have had many times that
> time to diverge<
>
> The quotation from Claiborne which I cited seems to
> put the period at closer to 1000 years for English
> and Norse. Other books I have looked at are very
> vague about when Germanic broke up. What reasons
> does Stefan have for his 2-4 centuries? There is of
> course a confusing element as regards English and
>(Danish) Norse in that their speakers arrived from
> much the same place, but I think the Danes had
> spread into Jutland and further south from Sweden in

> the meantime.

John, I don't recall in detail what I wrote, but I
probably was not being clear enough.  The timing of
when Old English, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old Norse
diverged is inherently hard to define, because it was
an inherently gradual process, without abrupt shifts.
Here is a thumbnail history of the current
understanding among historical linguists:

As late as the 500's AD, runic inscriptions were still
being written in a single Northwest Germanic language;
after 600, regional variations are reflected in
writing.  Since these regional variations probably
were underway before the Anglo-Saxon migration staring
in 450, the common runic written language must not
have reflected the still superficial but growing
dialect differences that had already occurred.

Up into the 400's AD, the Northwest Germanic languages
appear to have been only dialects of a single
language.  It takes time for an innovation to take
root, and innovations are unlikely to spread across
open sea.  Thus the lowland/North Sea Germanic
innovations that the Angles and Saxons carried to
Britain must have been underway before the migration
started in the mid-400's.  An example of a
lowland/North Sea Germanic innovation is nasal loss:
gans > goose, finf > fif, tanth > tooth.

High German dialects appear to have started the High
German sound shift (pepper > Pfeffer, tanth >
Zand/Zahn etc.) by the 400's.  Pre-Old Norse shared
several elements with the West Germanic varieties,
e.g. loss of n before -s- (but not of n before th or
f), and the reasoning is that North Sea
Germanic/Ingveonic was a transition dialect between
German and Scandinavian varities.  The loss of n
before s (gans > goose/gaas) spread into Norse, but
the later shifts losing n/m before f and th did not
reach Norse: the dialect continuum had been broken,
and innovations no longer flowed readily between the
populations.

When the Angles and Saxons abandoned the poor soil of
Jutland for Britain in the 400's and 500's, they left
a gap, both in population and in the dialect
continuum.  When the Danes migrated south into vacated
Jutland circa 500, the transitional language links
were gone in England, and Norse and Northsea Germanic
could soon be called separate languages.

>From the Old English migrations of the 400's and
500's, when the Northwest Germanic dialects were
becoming languages, to the viking Danelaw of the 800's
and 900's is the 2-4 (or 5, arguably) centuries of
definite seperation.  Post-viking English and
Scandinavian languages of the 1200's had had been
diverging far more than their ancesters centuries
earlier.

Trying to decide when to say that Old English (written
since 700 AD), Old Saxon (since 830) and Old Frisian
(since the 1200's) is even more difficult: there
aren't enough texts from early on and the languages
only slowly diverged.  I'd hesitate to be more exact
than sometime between 500 at the earliest, more likely
after 700, but they could conceivably be considered
mutual dialects for many centuries after that.

> I found the following in the article "Norse" in the
> "Oxford Companion to the English Language".
> "In its origin and earliest form, English is classed
> with the West Germanic languages, a group which
> comprised the ancestors of Dutch, Frisian and
> German, but a detailed comparison of the languages
> in their present form might place English nearer to
> the North German group."

It depends on how you define 'linguistically nearer'.
English is clearly a West Germanic language, but being
a lowland/North Sea Germanic language, it is much
closer to North Germanic ones than inland West
Germanic dialects are: English and Scandinavian share
some innovations.  English and Scandinavian also share
coincidental similarities: both happen to lack some
innovations of German (e.g. p > pf).

Stefan Israel

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