posted
My Old English professor had a course in Old Norse when he was in college. I have no idea how much he still knows. And of course, I won't see him until Wednesday during the final. But if you want to post something here, I'll take a crack at it. I probably won't be able to do anything with it, but it'll be fun to try.
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I need to know what "A wolf in hallowed places" looks like in either Old Norse or Old Icelandic. It's from the Volsung Saga, so I guess Icelandic would be prefferable. But beggars can't be choosers.
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posted
Found it, thanks for the help though. Let's see, this is on Google page... 18. I think that's a new personal record.
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posted
Actually, Mack, Old Norse didn't combine to make Old English. Old English already existed, and then it borrowed lots of words from Old Norse when the Vikings started taking over eastern England.
But anyway, translated into Old Norse is something I definitely cannot do. Good thing you found it, though.
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posted
As I was taught, it wasn't a borrowing of terms, it was a combination of the language the Vikings spoke and the Anglo-Saxon already on the island. It resulted in dual words, like shatter and scatter.
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posted
Both were originally Germanic, though, so they had lots of similarities. But the biggest and longest lasting words from Old Norse are "their" and "theirs" and "they."
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English is actually a Germanic language, but not eighty percent German. English and German are both in the Germanic part of the Indo-European language groups, but both had significant changes that made them very different from one another, and consequently, separate languages. Modern English is traced back to Middle English (the English of Chaucer) and back to Old English or Anglo-Saxon. Very little of the Breton language (a Celtic language and a different language branch from English entirely) survives in English, aside from some geographic words like the river Avon (from the Celtic word avon--river). The Anglo-Saxon invasions brought their language to Britian and it became the lingua franca and eventually the language of Britian as the Celt moved out to Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and over the English Channel to Brittany (part of France). Two vowel shifts took place and separated German and English. The German vowel shift was what separated the Germanic languages from the rest of the Indo-European languages. Later, in Britian, the Great Vowel Shift occured over a couple hundred years, ending somewhere before Shakespeare's time and the beginning of Early Modern English. This Shift, with the movement of the sounds to the upper front of the mouth and the diphthonization of the vowels, separated English from German. Subsequent invasions after the Anglo-Saxons continued to form the English language. Anglo-Saxon was a case-based language, where sentence structure depended on the endings of words and not word order within the sentence. Then the other invasions took place, first the Vikings in the 800s, and the language began to change. The addition of the Vikings (whose language was very similar to the Anglo-Saxons, much like an American speaking with an Australian) added more vocabulary and some instances of doublets to the language (such as the Anglo Saxon scatter and the Viking shatter). It also started softening the language to more word-order based, like today's language with the use of prepositions, where word order is very important in the sentence to determine meaning.
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posted
I wonder, Would anyone get the reference if I mentioned Bill Hicks and his "Time for a question" bit.
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posted
Actually, I believe that Old Norse and Old English come from different branches of the Germanic languages: they are North Germanic and West Germanic, respectively. They weren't close enough to be considered different dialects of the same language. As I understand it, the Viking influence was mostly a borrowing of vocabulary, but I didn't know that it affected word order at all. Did you get that from a web site, or is that all from your memory?
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posted
Oh, I'm not trying to argue with you, Mack (and not just because I fear the thumping stick ). I've just never heard that Old Norse impacted English grammar so much. Of course, I'll be taking History of the English Language next semester, so it could just be that I'm not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be.
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That's okay. It's just what I learned. I had to look up my notes because I wasn't too sure anymore, either. But old English (what is really Anglo-Saxon) looks a LOT like Old Norse.
Or so sayeth Dr. Elona Lucas Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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). I've just never heard that Old Norse impacted English grammar so much. Of course, I'll be taking History of the English Language next semester, so it could just be that I'm not as knowledgeable as I'd like to be.
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