English as a Scandinavian language?

[Jonlang]

I'm not sure if this was ever brought up here, but I'll bring it up now:

In 2014, Jan Terje Faarlund - Professor of Linguistics at Oslo University published a paper (English: The Language of the Vikings) claiming English to be a Scandinavian language which was only influenced by Anglo-Saxon and that Anglo-Saxon died out. His claim is, apparently, based on the fact that English grammar is much closer to Norwegian than it is to German, Frisian, or Dutch. I haven't read the paper, I just came by this via YouTube.

Has there been any discussion of this, or any responses to this paper?

[Ephraim]

There was some discussion at the time. Here’s a response by Kristin Bech and George Walkden:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals ... 95509F0815

Also, here’s some back-and-forth between Faarlund and Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden (in Norwegian). See also the comment section. This was before Emonds and Faarlund’s 2014 monograph.*

https://www.apollon.uio.no/artikler/201 ... avisk.html
https://www.apollon.uio.no/artikler/201 ... tsvar.html
https://www.apollon.uio.no/artikler/201 ... svar2.html

Edit:
Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351

* It was actually published as a book. Available here for those interested:
https://www.academia.edu/10360982/Engli ... he_Vikings

[bradrn]

Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351

This extract strikes me as interesting:

Parallel but independent innovations in closely-related languages are well known and reliably attested. The process is known as drift, and (apologies for oversimplifying slightly here) it results from structural imbalances that make particular bits of grammar hard to learn.

I hadn’t seen this conception of language drift before. Do you have any more information on this?

[Jonlang]

Interesting. I'll add it to my reading list.

[Moose-tache]

I made a conlang Yorwicks, a descendant of Old Norse that survives to the present day in the Vale of Pickering (maybe some day I'll finish and publish it here). One thing I ultimately noticed is that if you use the right sound changes and grammatical developments you can basically make Yorwicks indisinguishable from a highly divergent English dialect. The West and North Germanic languages really weren't that different eleven hundred years ago.

As the paper linked above point out, though, the sound changes make it clear on close inspection that English is West Germanic. No amount of Anglo-Saxon influence would make the Norse remember those coda nasals they had gotten rid of, and put them back in.

[Ephraim]

Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351

This extract strikes me as interesting:

Parallel but independent innovations in closely-related languages are well known and reliably attested. The process is known as drift, and (apologies for oversimplifying slightly here) it results from structural imbalances that make particular bits of grammar hard to learn.

I hadn’t seen this conception of language drift before. Do you have any more information on this?

Can’t say I’m that familiar with the literature on this subject, but you may want to check out this open access book:
https://brill.com/view/title/54246

See in particular chapter 8 where Na’ama Pat-El discusses parallel but independent syntactic changes in Semitic. She defines parallel development as ”the independent development of similar changes in languages of common genetic origin because of a trait in their common genetic material.” See her references for further reading.

The above mentioned George Walkden’s 2012 thesis ”Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic” may be of some interest when it comes to early Germanic syntax. It has some references to drift under 2.3, in particular 2.3.3, but it’s probably not the best introduction to this subject.
http://walkden.space/Walkden_2012_thesis.pdf

[bradrn]

Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351

This extract strikes me as interesting:

Parallel but independent innovations in closely-related languages are well known and reliably attested. The process is known as drift, and (apologies for oversimplifying slightly here) it results from structural imbalances that make particular bits of grammar hard to learn.

I hadn’t seen this conception of language drift before. Do you have any more information on this?

Can’t say I’m that familiar with the literature on this subject, but you may want to check out this open access book:
https://brill.com/view/title/54246

Thanks! This book actually looks really useful to me in general — I’m always interested in learning about the diachronics of syntax. (And I see it also has some of Gildea’s stuff on the diachronics of alignment in Cariban, which I’ve been trying to find for some time.) I’ll have to read this as soon as I get time.

[Travis B.]

I made a conlang Yorwicks, a descendant of Old Norse that survives to the present day in the Vale of Pickering (maybe some day I'll finish and publish it here). One thing I ultimately noticed is that if you use the right sound changes and grammatical developments you can basically make Yorwicks indisinguishable from a highly divergent English dialect. The West and North Germanic languages really weren't that different eleven hundred years ago.

As the paper linked above point out, though, the sound changes make it clear on close inspection that English is West Germanic. No amount of Anglo-Saxon influence would make the Norse remember those coda nasals they had gotten rid of, and put them back in.

Remember that Old Norse did have nasal vowels (despite that they usually were not written, outside of the First Grammatical Treatise), which were lost only at a late stage (outside of Elfdalian, which preserves them to this day).

As you mention, though, there are cases such as the /w/ in word which are unambiguously West Germanic features of English without a doubt.

[Ephraim]

I made a conlang Yorwicks, a descendant of Old Norse that survives to the present day in the Vale of Pickering (maybe some day I'll finish and publish it here). One thing I ultimately noticed is that if you use the right sound changes and grammatical developments you can basically make Yorwicks indisinguishable from a highly divergent English dialect. The West and North Germanic languages really weren't that different eleven hundred years ago.

As the paper linked above point out, though, the sound changes make it clear on close inspection that English is West Germanic. No amount of Anglo-Saxon influence would make the Norse remember those coda nasals they had gotten rid of, and put them back in.

Remember that Old Norse did have nasal vowels (despite that they usually were not written, outside of the First Grammatical Treatise), which were lost only at a late stage (outside of Elfdalian, which preserves them to this day).

As you mention, though, there are cases such as the /w/ in word which are unambiguously West Germanic features of English without a doubt.

I think Emond & Faarlund’s answer would be that words with those unambiguously West Germanic features are still of Old English origin, even though they think that the Norse contribution to the vocabulary of Middle English is bigger than traditionally assumed. They write (p. 53): ”We do not contest the common assumption that the lexicon of the new language, Middle English, ended up as more English than Scandinavian. This widespread belief is nonetheless based on assuming that a Middle English cognate of an Old English word always descends from the latter, all else being equal.”

On p. 57, they summarize their view:
• The traditional view (4a): During two centuries, Old English speakers in their own country added to or replaced around a sixth of their vocabulary with that of Norse settlers, whose language was dying out; or:
• Our proposal (4b): During four centuries, Norse speakers in a new country and culture added to or replaced around a third of their vocabulary with that of Old English speakers around them, who were slowly adopting Norse.

But I think the inflectional endings of Middle English looks a lot more like their descended from Old English than form Old Norse, even if the inflectional morphology is greatly reduced. For some nasal endings (i.e. on weak nouns), I guess it’s possible that the nasal could have been restored from Old Norse nasal vowels, but it’s not really clear that Old Norse had unstressed nasal vowels during the relevant time frame (although there is at least indirect evidence that such vowels existed at one point). Nasalization was retained longer for long, stressed vowels. Elfdalian unstressed nasal vowels are an innovation from yet another round of nasal consonant loss.

[Travis B.]

But I think the inflectional endings of Middle English looks a lot more like their descended from Old English than form Old Norse, even if the inflectional morphology is greatly reduced.

That is my thought too - Middle English morphosyntax looks much more West Germanic than North Germanic (e.g. solely preposed articles, -/ən/ infinitive endings, (in the case of southern Middle English) the whole verb inflection paradigm (the modern -/s/ 3rd-sg-pres marker could be descended from North Germanic), -/s/ and some -/ən/ plurals, lack of inflected middle voice marking, and so on. The main real North Gemanic-ish features in this department is the transformation of the underlying word order from SOV+V2 to SVO+V2, which then became just SVO except in some limited cases, and the -/s/ 3rd-sg-pres marker that was found in northern Middle English which became universal by the end of the Early Modern English period.