{"id":17962,"date":"2012-11-28T10:14:42","date_gmt":"2012-11-28T15:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17962"},"modified":"2018-01-15T18:09:18","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T23:09:18","slug":"is-english-really-a-scandinavian-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/28\/is-english-really-a-scandinavian-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Is English really a Scandinavian language?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4710\" target=\"_blank\">ESR<\/a> on some recent linguistic speculation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Here\u2019s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I\u2019ve run across in a while. Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (\u201cOld English\u201d) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; rather, our language is more closely related to the dialect of Old Norse spoken in the Danelaw (the Viking-occupied part of England) after about 865.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Previously on this blog my commenters and I have kicked around the idea that English is best understood as the result of a double creolization process &mdash; that it evolved from a contact pidgin formed between Anglo-Saxon and Danelaw Norse. The creole from that contact then collided, a century later, with Norman French. Wham, bam, a second contact pidgin forms; English is the creole descended from the language of (as the SF writer H. Beam Piper famously put it) \u201cNorman soldiers attempting to pick up Anglo-Saxon barmaids\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>This is not so different from the professors\u2019 account, actually. They win if the first creole, the barmaids\u2019 milk language, was SVO with largely Norse grammar and some Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. The conventional history of English would have the girls speaking an SOV\/V2 language with largely Anglo-Saxon grammar and some Norse vocabulary.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>ESR on some recent linguistic speculation: Here\u2019s the most interesting adventure in linguistics I\u2019ve run across in a while. Two professors in Norway assert that English is a Scandinavian language, a North Germanic rather than a West Germanic one. More specifically, they claim that Anglo-Saxon (\u201cOld English\u201d) is not the direct ancestor of modern English; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1118,7,16],"tags":[273,400,610,961],"class_list":["post-17962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-germany","category-history","category-science","tag-denmark","tag-language","tag-norway","tag-vikings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4FI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17963,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17962\/revisions\/17963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}