26. Scandinavian loans.

The Scandinavian invasions had far-reaching linguistic consequences which became apparent mainly in ME; the greater part of lexical borrowings from OScand was not recorded until the 13th c.

The presence of the Scandinavians in the English population is indicated by a large number of place-names in the northern and eastern areas, most frequent are place-names with the Scandinavian components thorp "village*, Woodthorp

The fusion of the English and of the Scandinavian settlers progressed rapidly; in many districts people became bilingual, which was an easy accomplishment since many of the commonest words in the two OG languages were very much alike.

It is noteworthy that the number of Scandinavian loan-words in the Northern dialects has always been higher than in the Midlands and in the South. Probably in Early ME there were more Scandinavian words in current use than have survived today. Some words died out or were retained only in the local dialects, e.g. kirk 'church'.

It is difficult to define the semantic spheres of Scandinavian borrowings: they mostly pertain to everyday life and do not differ from native words. Only the earliest loan-words deal with military and legal matters and reflect the relations of the people during the Danish raids and Danish rule. Cnif (NE knife) similarly fellow which stemmed from OScand felagi, indicated one who lays down a fee, as a partner or shareholder. In the subsequent centuries many Scandinavian military and legal terms disappeared or were displaced by French terms.

Examples of everyday words of Scandinavian origin. Nouns — bag, band, cake, crook, dirt, egg, wing; adjectives —ill, low, ugly, weak, wrong; verbs —call, cast, crawl, cut, die,

It must be mentioned that form-words are rarely borrowed from a foreign language. The Scandinavian pronoun pegg (3rd p. pl) Gradually they, together with the forms them, their, themselves displaced OE hie.

It is believed that the final selection of they (instead of hie) was favoured, if not caused, by the resemblance of ME descendants of several pronouns of the 3rd p.: hie, he, and heo, ("they¹, 'he*, 'she'). It was at that ti me that OE heo was replaced by she.

Other form-words borrowed from Scandinavian are: both, though, fro (which was used interchangeably with the native parallel from and has been preserved in the phrase to and fro).

Vocabulary changes due to Scandinavian influence proceeded in different ways: 1. a Scandinavian word could enter the language as an innovation, without replacing any other lexical item; such was probably the case of law, fellow, outlaw. 2. More often, however, the loan-word was a synonym of a native English word and their rivalry led to different results: the loan-word could eventually disappear or could be restricted to dialectal use (e.g. Late OE barda 'ship*, lip 'fleet'); it could take the place of the native word (e.g. they, take, call, which replaced OE hie, niman, clipian)', both the borrowed and the native words could survive as synonyms with a slight difference in meaningsky (from 0 Scand sky 'cloud') and heaven

Scandinavian words were very much like native words. The only criteria that can be applied are some phonetic features of borrowed words:the consonant cluster tsk ] is a frequent mark of Scandinavian loan-words, e.g. sky^ skill (see the lists above); [sk] does not occur in native words, as OTE [sk] had been palatalised and modified to [ƒ] cf. ME fish, ship (from OE fisc, scip, see §403).¹ The sounds l|] and [sk] are sometimes found in related words in the two languages: native shirt and the Scandinavian loan-word skirt are etymological doublets (which means that they go back to the same Germanic root but have been subjected to different phonetic and semantic changes;

Other criteria of the same type are the sounds [k] and [g] before front vowels, which in native words normally became [t ƒ] and [dзl. Cf. kid (from 0 Scand) and chin (native, from OE cin).

The intimate relations of the languages, among other things, could result in phonetic modification of native words. Words like give, get, gift are included by some scholars in the list of Scandinavian loan-words on the basis of this criterion, but are also regarded as instances of phonetic influence upon native words; we may say that ME gyven, geten and gift were Northern variants of the words whose pronunciation was influenced by Scandinavian; nevertheless, they are native words. The same is true of the word sister, which goes back to native OE sweostor and to 0 Scand systir.