Borrowing from early Scandinavian

The long succession of Viking Age raids, settlements, conquests, and political take-overs that played such a large part in Anglo-Saxon history from the late-eighth century onwards resulted in many speakers of varieties of early Scandinavian being found in Britain. In particular, there were areas of significant Scandinavian settlement in the east and north east of England (chiefly of speakers of East Norse varieties) and in the north west of England (chiefly of speakers of West Norse varieties), as well as in parts of Scotland. We speak of ?early Scandinavian? in this context because we are dealing with the antecedent stage of the later Scandinavian languages, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, etc. (As regards the divisions among the Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Norwegian are both West Norse languages, while Swedish and Danish are East Norse languages; however, very few of the Scandinavian loanwords in English can be assigned with any confidence to specifically East Norse or West Norse input.)

Gradually, over the course of generations, the use of early Scandinavian died out in England, but not without leaving a significant impact on the vocabulary of English. When most borrowings occurred is a matter of some uncertainty; Old English texts up to about the year 1100 are estimated to contain only about 100 Scandinavian loanwords, many of them in isolated examples. Most of these words come from semantic areas in which there was significant cultural influence from the Scandinavians, such as seafaring, warfare, social ranks, law, or coins and measures. Many, many more Scandinavian borrowings are first recorded in Middle English texts, but it is very possible (and indeed likely) that most of these first entered some varieties of English in the Old English period. One major indicator of this is that very early Middle English texts from areas of high Scandinavian settlement are full of Scandinavian borrowings.

The long homiletic poem entitled the Ormulum is the work of an Augustinian canon called Orm (a name of Scandinavian origin) who probably lived in south Lincolnshire; the dating is controversial, but Orm may have started work on the text as early as the middle of the twelfth century and continued well into old age. It contains well over a hundred words of either certain or likely Scandinavian origin, including some which are of common occurrence in modern English such as to anger, to bait, bloom, boon, booth, bull, to die, to flit, ill, law, low,meek,to raise,root,to scare, skill, skin, to take, though, to thrive, wand, to want, wing, wrong. Perhaps most interestingly of all, it contains some of the earliest evidence for one of the most important Scandinavian borrowings, the pronoun they and the related object form them and possessive their.

The example of they, them, and their is very instructive about the nature and extent of Scandinavian influence on English. It is very rare for pronouns to be borrowed; the fact that these forms were borrowed probably reflects both the very close contact between Scandinavian and English speakers, and the close structural and lexical similarities between the two languages. Because so many words, forms, and constructions were already either identical or very similar, this made it much easier for even grammatical words to be borrowed.

Something else illustrated by they, them, and their is the long process of internal spread, from variety to variety, shown by many words of Scandinavian origin after they entered English. Orm uses theyinvariably, but them and their vary in his text with the native forms hem and her. In later northern or eastern texts them and their quite quickly become the normal forms, but this takes much longer in other varieties: the most important early Chaucer manuscripts, from London in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, have typically they for the subject form but still hem and her for the object and possessive forms.

The inherited similarities between English and early Scandinavian also make it extremely difficult to be certain in very many cases whether a word actually shows a Scandinavian borrowing at all, or an Old English word which is simply poorly attested in our surviving sources. The Scandinavian component in the total vocabulary of Middle English perhaps amounts to somewhere in the region of 2 or 3 per cent, but any figures must be treated with a good deal of caution. In spite of the relatively small total, many of the words occur with quite high frequency, especially in texts from more northerly and easterly areas. Some Scandinavian borrowings which were doubtless borrowed in either Old English or Middle English are first attested much later; this is especially the case with words preserved only in regional use.

7. Borrowing from Latin and/or French

The Latin component in the vocabulary of Old English was small, only amounting to a few per cent of the total of surviving Old English words, and many (but by no means all) of these words were doubtless of very rare occurrence, confined to very occasional use by scholars. The securely identified pre-Conquest borrowings from French amount to barely a handful, and even in very late, post-Conquest Old English not many more are recorded.

In Middle English this picture changes radically. If we look at the vocabulary of Middle English as a whole, the evidence of dictionaries suggests that the number of words borrowed from French and/or Latin outstrips the number of words surviving from Old English by quite a margin. However, words surviving from Old English (as well as a few of the Scandinavian borrowings, especially they) continue to top the high frequency lists (as indeed mostly remains the case even in modern-day English).

The formulation ?French and/or Latin? is an important one in this period. Often we can tell that a word has come from French rather than Latin very clearly because of differences of word form: for instance, English peace is clearly a borrowing from Anglo-Norman and Old French pais, not from Latin pac-, pāx. Some other pretty clear examples are marble,mercy,prison,palfrey,to pay,poor, and rule. It is often much more difficult to be certain that a Middle English word has come solely from Latin and not partly also from French; this is because, in addition to the words it inherited from Latin (which typically showed centuries of change in word form), French also borrowed extensively from Latin (often re-borrowing words which already existed in a distinct form). Some typical examples areanimal,imagination,to inform,patient,perfection,profession,religion,remedy.

Given these factors, any figures for the relative proportions of French and Latin borrowings in the Middle English period have to be hedged about with many provisos. However, the broad picture is clear. In Middle English, borrowing from French is at least as frequent as borrowing from Latin, and probably rather more frequent.

By 1500, over 40 per cent of all of the words that English has borrowed from French had made a first appearance in the language, including a very high proportion of those French words which have come to play a central part in the vocabulary of modern English. By contrast, the greatest peak of borrowing from Latin was still to come, in the early modern period; by 1500, under 20 per cent of the Latin borrowings found in modern English had yet entered the language.

The greatest peak of first examples of French borrowings in English comes in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This probably largely corresponds to the realities of linguistic change, since we know that this is the period in which English was taking on many technical functions from Latin and, especially, French, at least so far as written records were concerned. However, this is precisely when our volume of surviving Middle English material also goes up dramatically, and so we cannot always rule out the possibility that words existed in English rather earlier. Certainly, some much earlier texts, such as the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, show considerable borrowing from French at an early date, and we cannot always be certain that an absence of earlier attestations necessarily means that a word did not exist in at least some varieties of English at an earlier date.

Mixed language texts pose many difficult challenges. One quite common pattern is for accounts, records, and other official documents to have Latin as the ?matrix? language, but to switch freely to a vernacular language to name particular things or concepts. Whether the vernacular language in question is French or English can be very difficult to tell, or in many cases plain impossible. In fact, many scholars who have spent time working on such documents take the view that the writers themselves probably did not always distinguish very clearly between one clearly defined vocabulary as ?English? and another as ?French?; the considerable overlap, of words belonging to both languages (as a result of earlier borrowing), in a context in which new words were being borrowed all of the time, would indeed have made it almost impossible to make such a clear distinction, especially in many areas of technical vocabulary. For some examples of some of the implications for OED data see the entries for oillet n., pane n.¹, pastern n., pullen n., rack v.², russet n. and adj.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 12