Nasty, brutish, and short.
A Norwegian friend, now a missionary in Brazil, sent me a link today that set my heart a-dancing. And believe me, my heart could use the exercise.
According to this article from a Norwegian web site (don’t worry, it’s in English), a University of Oslo professor, Jan Terje Faarlund, has published a radical thesis. English, he claims, is a Scandinavian language.
No, really.
Faarlund and his colleague Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, now believe they can prove that English is in reality a Scandinavian language, in other words it belongs to the Northern Germanic language group, just like Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. This is totally new and breaks with what other language researchers and the rest of the world believe, namely that English descends directly from Old English. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century.
It goes like this. Traditionally we’ve been told that our English language, as we speak it now, is the product of a cultural collision between Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons (who were nasty, brutish and short, the guys King Arthur fought against), and Norman French (the language of the guys who conquered the Anglo-Saxons). It’s also generally acknowledged that there was some influence from the Old Norse language of the handsome, sophisticated, and nice-smelling Danish settlers of northern England.
But Faarlund notes that the English dialect that finally ended up becoming modern English comes from the East Midlands, which was part of the Danish settlement. Also, English grammar is closer to that of Scandinavian languages than to West German languages (like Dutch and Flemish).
So if you’re an English speaker, you’re a Scandinavian, and you never knew it.
Doesn’t that make your day better?
(As for the image that accompanies the article, he’s saying, “I promise never to do that again.” And she’s saying, “We’ve discussed this before.”)
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