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.”)
That’s a really interesting theory.
Nevertheless, there’s a historic difficulty: the old Danelaw was, even in Anglo-Saxon times before the Viking invasions, a territory very much on the periphery of Saxon society. The core of the civilization was the West and South of England; the North was dangerous, and the people there always somewhat hostile to the distant Saxon rulers. Adding the Danish element created a further separation in terms of law and culture.
So why would the Saxon civilization in the West and South abandon their language in favor of a language from Northumbria and the Danelaw? It would have made more sense, if they were going to abandon their own tongue, to adopt the French of the Norman ruling class.
As I understand it, they’re not saying the Anglo-Saxons adopted Danish. They’re saying it was a Danish dialect that eventually got regularized as standard English, rather than a West Germanic version.
It’s the same problem, though, isn’t it? This would be somewhat like someone deciding to standardize and regulate Spanglish as it is spoken in parts of Miami, and call it “New Modern English.” You could do it, but how would you get the rest of the country to go along with it?
The theory could still be right, but the political and cultural shift necessary strikes me as a problem in need of an explanation.
I would think that would depend on the point of time when the shift occurs. I would peg this one at some time considerably after the Norman conquest.
Yes, possibly there is an answer there. Still, I’d like to hear more before I decide which theory to believe. It’s quite a claim — I appreciate your affinity for it, which I share, but all the same!