Old Norse and Old English

hi I'm opener specialist dr. Jackson Crawford I teach at the University of Colorado Boulder previously at UC Berkeley and UCLA now as a student and instructor of Old Norse for many years I of course also have extensive familiarity with other old Germanic languages including Old English and what I want to cover in this video are a couple of different subjects related to the interaction or relationship between Old Norse and Old English as these are fairly common questions from people one of the most interesting subjects for a lot of people is the question of whether Old Norse and Old English would have been mutually intelligible languages since to us as students of them as has foreign languages that definitely look similar and if you know Old Norse or Old English the other one is definitely easy to learn to read well one thing to keep in mind in interpreting this question is that the textbook forms of these languages the form of Old Norse you'll learn if you pick up a textbook from today or from a hundred years ago whether fox or gordon or whatever or if you're looking at dictionaries of Old Norse or the same with Old English if you're looking at you know something anything from sweets anglo-saxon primer on or the Bosworth Tyler dictionary of Old English whatever what you're going to see there are fairly standardized forms of these languages that don't reflect all of the variety in in in speech and writing that existed in these languages during all the time they were spoken and in all the areas they were spoken our standardized textbook Old Norse tends to be old Icelandic of about twelve 58d this is roughly the language of most of the sagas and that most of the etic poems were written down in but probably not originally composed in and then in Old English late West Saxon is the typical standardized form this reflect the language around Wessex in the late 900s or up to about the Year 1000 and so clearly if you're talking about Northern England in the early viking-age say the early eight hundreds what you're going to have is something that's not similar to textbook well it's similar to but it's not the same as textbook Old English they're going to have an early form of Northumbria and English confronting something that's not the same as textbook Old Norse saddle design a control fifty it's going to be old Danish in the early 800 s and so basing our questions of mutual intelligibility just on those standard languages isn't actually necessarily that useful so for example just on the most basic level if someone were to say we are Vikings well in textbook Old Norse that old Icelandic of about 1250 you would have their air room leaking God note that I'm pronouncing this as and spelling it as old Icelandic not as modern athletic in this video even more than in my other videos it's important to draw a distinction between contemporary pronunciation at the time and the way that modern I Sonic is often used to stand in for Old Norse today alright so there a room beacon god that would be your 1250 Icelandic but in old Danish of the eight hundreds we might expect this to sound a little bit more like we're air ohm weaking ah that's certainly a little bit different and then if we look at standard Old English we would have way seemed reaching gasps possibly weakened us but I think there's probably palatalized mold English but if you then look at say early Northumbrian Old English that would instead be way a out on reaching us which is or we Qing goz suppose that s could be voiced this is obviously a little bit more like the Norse at least in the form of our a Arun versus Old Norse air room instead of the Saxon form which is sin which might remind you of course of Germans int so we need to keep in mind all that variation and of course this is something it also comes up if you're looking at borrowings from Old Norse into English which I'll talk about momentarily these are borrowings largely from old Danish in the 800s not from textbook Old Norse and that can explain why some words that are said to be Norse an origin don't look like the Norse form as we usually look up the Norse word for instance the word wand which in Old Norse standard text with Old Norse is wonder and old Danish you'd actually expect that to be something like wander at this time and so the borrowing from Old Norse is more eligible now if we take a whole stanza in Old Norse and that's what I'm gonna do here I have this classic example I use of a sentence to show people how close the languages are which is I will burn your house now in standard Old Norse that's it feel brand it who's an Old English we would get something like each with a there are none scene whose you can certainly see the similarity but this is an artificial sentence so I wanted to take something that's actually natural Old Norse written by somebody other than me and turn that into Old English to kind of give you an idea of how close and different they are and what I'm going to do is I'm going to take whole them all the wisdom of Odin stands with 1:38 a stanza that I use as an example of lots of different things so here it is as it is preserved in Old Norse this is of course in a form closer to that text book old Icelandic but it'll have to do the 8 ik @ ik ik vind Gamay the OL NAT or a lot of knee you gariand other or Kevin oh nice all Versova mare or they made the air man give 8 where son of wrote Imran now serious Old English people might quibble with how I'm gonna put that into your typical textbook Old English but here's a shot what each that each hang wind gang mod on Nita Alan Egon Gaara wounded and yeven world so Selvam a on mod the non Mon watt pass hey of two Marines a little bit different you can certainly see that for the most part I'm able to use exactly cognate words the heck and the first line in Old Norse that kak is the result of a formerly word final in G that is a sound change to Old Norse that might have happened in the Viking Age so it is possible that for instance and a Dane of eight hundreds would have so said something like hang more similar to the Old English form the only word I had to make up in the Old English was mod for tree cognate with this somewhat rare Old Norse word neither that word might have existed in old english there is a word wool mode for distaff I will tree that could be from the same word but it's not strictly attested so I've got an asterisk on it and of course they use different words for and the Old Norse word for and oak is cognate with English eek isn't also but that's never been used as a simple conjunction in English so I just used our and and of course the poetic way of expressing no man or Old Norse monkey there's nothing like that and Old North and Old English so I just wrote that is non Mon no no man you can see that still the languages are close enough there's very good possibilities for translating poetry into poetry and having the poetry still work just fine as far as I can tell this works pretty well as poetry in Old English too although again my specialization is in Norse so don't come after me Old English people now the similarity of these two languages is something that speakers were aware of on the Old North Side in goon louse saga hors d'oeuvres tongue goo and in the first grammatical treatise works written in the probably late 12th hundreds and mid 1100 respectively we have a note that people well and good luck saga there's a note that that seems to seek to explain the fact that our hero good loud warm tongue is composing Norse poetry for an English king but it explains that at the time English and well did the English with the same pointers is the Norse and the first grammatical treatise says the English who are of one tongue with us even if both languages have changed a little or one quite a bit and that's actually a very aware remark when you get down to the relationship between these two languages and on the old English side there's some awareness of the similarity for instance in the Battle of Malden how the Norse in the English seemed to converse just fine of course that could be a literary convention but it's interesting to note that there's one line one forty nine where it says for let thought ring assume a daughter of Honda and this is talking about a Viking in it so that's then some Drang ger let a spear fly from his hand so it looks like the English poet is borrowing the Norse word Wrangler to sort of sarcastically call this enemy Viking by the word that they use for an awesome warrior and also we see some awareness of the similarity just by the way that that Old English place names are replaced by their Old Norse equivalents in areas that the north settled in the Danelaw they seem to be very aware of the meanings of the English elements so instead of just adopting the English elements wholesale they sort of translate them into their own language the most famous example is Old English AO for each bore Bay being replaced by the Norse equivalent your Zeke which of course is what the modern English York comes from not from the Old English war but you also see this in the wholesale replacement of elements like Old English hey by Old Norse Hoka from mound and you know I so I think I've used the example of Spanish and Italian before and I do think that's a rough example of where Old English and Old Norse would be in terms of mutual intelligibility during the Viking Age people can tell the languages are related that they're not totally alien to one another but if you haven't actually had conscious attempts at trying to understand it before initially you might have a pretty hard time understanding the other language but then over time you develop an awareness of what the course Spahn dances of sound are I think about this today if you're learning another dialect or accent or something say you're impersonating a southern accent you might take all of the sounds I in English like a knight or fly and replace them with the monophthong ah because most American English speakers are aware that that's a common southern sound correspondence so saying not and fly instead of night fly and in a similar way these languages are still close enough that these correspondences are pretty visible so for instance where there is a long a and old English there is an AI diphthong in Old Norse so ston versus stained stone versus Haim at home versus aim one where there is a w before an O or you and hold English the Norse equivalent lacks the W or a V so English war and Old English of course is obvious about the English word is all the same in the Old English forms holding ash water Old Norse or armor worm Old English wolf or wolf and Old Norse over over Old English Loudoun and Old Norse oath in for the god Old English and and elsewhere that there is a W in Old English there is a V in Old Norse so wet that reverses weather although at the time that V in Old Norse might still up and pronounce this adobe you also in fact I suspect in the 800 to 900 so was although by the 1000 I think that probably the W in Old Norse had become a be at least in Western or maybe not in he snores but that's the subject for another video but then many many words have such close correspondences that they're virtually the same so for instance where you have a long o in Old English there'll be a long oh and Old Norse to bow versus bow for book stowed versus stow in Old Norse and of course there you could learn that unless it's following an inn or an L a final D an Old English is typically going to be a final if handled Norse that the sounds spelled as a D with a slash and even today if you look at the Scandinavian languages there are many words that betray their common origins and these are very basic words which is also a great indication if how close these languages are it's easy to borrow words that are kind of peripheral to your vocabulary right to borrow you know words like taco from Spanish or croissant from French to use examples of things that are associated with the cuisine of speakers of those languages but not necessarily words that are among the top 1000 most common words in your language but if there's a lot of correspondence between the most basic vocabulary that's an excellent sign that languages are truly closely quote unquote genetically related ie they share a common ancestor language so even today with the mainland Scandinavian languages you'll find words they're spelled exactly the same as their English equivalents that might be spelled a little bit differently that's a little different perhaps a little bit differently but that's just because English and Scandinavian have undergone a few different somewhat different sound changes so for instance the English words all over under for dr Fulk hand and same are spelled exactly the same today and a region d norse can mean the same thing although they're pronounced a little bit differently then you have words that are spelled a little bit different but sound almost the same to go sister in Norwegian universe which I'm using as an example because it's the kondal language I know best book book steward dare fest of glass coma and ting for their west of glass come and thing these languages are very easy for a speaker of English to learn and of course vice versa which partially explains how Scandinavians often speak very good English it's not a huge hurdle to jump to learn this language because lenders are already positioned very closely and they were even more so a thousand years ago now another thing to consider is the common heritage these languages share in culture and myth because as speakers of closely related languages the pre-christian religions of the Norse and English were apparently very close to now we don't actually get much written down about the pre-christian gods in Old English cultural cultural barriers were such that people were apparently not writing this stuff down sympathetically like they did in Iceland and the twelve hundreds but we can see in the days of the week that the gods were named with cognate names even if we don't know the stories about them so for instance answering to Old Norse 2:04 and to fig we find that the days of the week and Old English are named for tu Wotan soon the order and Fria which are exactly what we'd expect the names of those gods to be in Old English based on their common proto-germanic ancestors tea was lower than soon rose and real and so a lot of times people have tried to use the equivalent names of the Old English gods and the Old Norse gods to assume that Old English mythology must have been very similar to Old Norse mythology and it's certainly likely that they were similar but we also have to consider that probably and the many different centuries that separate the English from the Norse that the mythology so developed fairly differently as the mythology developed really differently even in different parts of Scandinavia we assume based on certain kinds of evidence you know remember that all of our written evidence really comes from Iceland and doesn't necessarily reflect stories about the gods from Sweden or Denmark or such now another thing that I can't go without talking about in a video about Norse in English are all the English words that come from Old Norse now again these languages are closely related to begin with but following Viking settlement in eastern England especially in other parts of the British Isles beginning in the 800s you have a lot of words from Old Norse that come into Old English and get naturalized and even though if you flip through a dictionary there are more words in English that are borrowed from French or Latin or other Romance sources the Old Norse loans tend to be deeper they tend to be words that are in those thousand words you use most often in fact some estimations have put the Old Norse percentage of typical English words at about ten percent of your daily normal vocabulary so any words that begin with ska are not native English words because in the history of Old English the sounds and so most of our words that start with ska come from Old Norse some come from Greek and from other sources but sky skill sculpt those are Norse words in English sometimes we even have pairs where the Old Norse word is preserved alongside its Old English cognate just with slightly differentiated meanings scatter versus shatter skirt versus shirt and skin versus shin words that have the sound followed by a front vowel have a Norse origin typically to give get and guess our Norse borrowings in English the equivalent words exist in Old English too but they start with yah which was the regular development of G before a front thou and I and he or unlettered you or Oh in Old English so the equivalence of give get and guess and Old English would be yeah and yet and I think you usin and you can also see this in the form of words that we kept from their Old English background like yellow and yield versus the Old Norse cognates of those that have cheese cooler and key all done take and die our very basic verbs we've borrowed from Old Norse we've also borrowed husband and sister which is interesting because we have the old English words for wife and brother who knows what social phenomena might be behind that law and egg our Old Norse words as our words that at simple adjectives that if your high school experience was anything like mine you heard a lot ugly and awkward and then most fascinatingly they them and there are norse words these did not reflect Old English he him and he era which might have been subconsciously rejected by speakers over time as being too close to he him and her instead these come from the old norse masculine plural they a fame and theta and then of course has many place names especially in england and places settled directly from england like north eastern north america that have old norse place name elements one of the most common is b meaning farm later town what you see in kirby derby Grimsby would be but also a meaning island in a place like ramsey and of course Thorp cleared farm and if you go around England looking at place names you'll see that names that end in these elements cluster in areas with a lot of Viking presents like eastern England you know your Lincolnshire Yorkshire type areas so there was a close relationship between these languages not just in the sense that they were descended from a relatively recent common ancestor they'd only probably been split for a few hundred years when the Vikings and nori encountered each other in England but also in the sense that they interacted very closely during the Viking Age and and later probably nor survived into the twelve hundreds or so as a spoken language in parts of eastern England and it certainly survived in Shetland and Orkney for many centuries longer than that and the form of Norn the naturalized later dialects of Norse which basically looks like a dialect in Norwegian that was spoken in those islands probably into the 1700s possibly her late 18-hundreds and influence the dialects in those areas today I hope that if you've enjoyed this video and similar videos on my channel made for free and beautiful places that you'll consider checking out my patreon I believe that knowledge about subjects like this shouldn't be left to Wikipedia and the public domain and it shouldn't be locked up in an ivory tower so I'm trying to bridge that gap and come down from the ivory tower and make available professional level knowledge about Old Norse language myths and related subjects in a personal way on YouTube and I hope that my rocky mountain homeland of Colorado and Wyoming makes it a more inviting viewing experience to also have translations at the port of getta as well as the saga of the volson's with the saga of Ragnar laws broken more translations coming in the near future so I hope that you'll keep an eye out for those too let me thank you for your time and attention and your patreon donations and from beautiful Wyoming I'm wishing you all the best you

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 63,471

Keywords: old, norse, english, vikings, old norse, old english, Norse myth, Norse myths, Norse mythology, Odin, Woden, Wotan, Thor, Thunor, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Tuesday, days of the week, history of the English language, english vocabulary, vocabulary, language history, viking language, norse language, old norse language, viking, language, Scandinavian, Scandinavian languages, historical linguistics, linguistics, Danelaw, anglo-saxon, germanic, intelligible, mutually, mutually intellgible, education

Id: BaWgJq9OVGM

Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 26 2018