Re: [conculture] Re: Greetings!

dunn patrick w wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Mathew Willoughby wrote:
>
> > they speak the same English as we do has it evolved completely differently?  I
> > would
> > imagine that they might have more celtic loanwords than
> > our English does.  Also, with greater resistance to the Viking invasions, I
> > imagine that it would have far less of a Norwegian/Danish influence
> > than our English does.
>
> Actually, even *with* the Danelaw, there's been a surpisingly small
> influence of Danish on English -- Old English resisted, somehow, influence
> from Danish.  Those things that look, on the surface, to be similarities
> are in fact evolved, frequently, from the fact that they're both Germanic
> languages.  You'll notice if you glance at the OED that most actual
> borrowings from Danish come *after* the Norman invasion!
But IIRC the Scandinavians actually settled in Northern England
(hence the fact that the largest percentage of lastnames in that part of
the country follow the Scandinavian custom of suffixing -son).  What's
to say that these two communities didn't exist side by side, together,
and English only began to absorb them, slowly, over a period of
centuries? Certainly, there was much competition between dialectal
forms, sometimes with the Scandinavian imports winning (the third
person plural pronouns, the word "sister", etc.), sometimes with both
existing simultaneously, with one acquiring new meanings (e.g., "skirt"
(from the Scandinavian element) and "shirt" (from the Anglo-Saxon
element), and sometimes with the native element winning out (most of
the language).  Certainly you don't expect all these competing forms
to have won out, finally, in the span of just two centuries?

It just seems simplistic to me to say that a given term became part
of the language on such and such date (they musta coexisted for a long
time for one to go one way or the other);  surely that's rather arbitrary?


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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

There's nothing particularly wrong with the
proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the
proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace
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