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Oct. 24, 2005 The Norse were a people who inhabited Scandinavia, today’s Norway, Sweden and Denmark, during the Middle Ages. Norse warriors who sailed the seas to the west, that is, to the British Isles and Iceland, and even to Greenland and North America, were called Vikings, while those who went east to Russia were called Varangians. The word ‘varyag’ is still used ironically in Russian to mean a westerner who comes to Russia to enlighten the Russians. The Vikings conquered and dwelt in parts of England from around 800 to 1100 AD. They were also called Norsemen, Northmen or Danes. England was even ruled by four Danish kings: Sweyn I of Denmark, Canute I, Harold I and Canute II, all of the 11th century. The language spoken by the Norse of that period is called Old Norse, which had three dialects, West Old Norse, East Old Norse and Old Gutnish, this latter being relative to the Swedish island of Gotland. West Old Norse is virtually identical to Old Icelandic. From Old Norse came today’s four Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic. Icelandic has changed the least from the Old Norse prototype. Many people erroneously think that Finnish is a Scandinavian language, but it would be difficult to find a language as dissimilar to the Scandinavian languages as Finnish, which is a beautiful language related to the numerous Lapp dialects and to Estonian and Hungarian. The Scandinavian languages are a subgroup of the Germanic (or Teutonic) languages, which include German, Dutch and English. So basically there are at least two ways in which an English word could be related to an Old Norse word. First, the germinal word may have existed in proto-Germanic, so that with the birth of either English or Old Norse, the word was already in use as an element of their common legacy. Second, the word might have come into the English language from Old Norse during the Viking occupation of England. It is not always possible to say for a certainty whether a word was merely part of the common stock or an English loanword from Old Norse. Here is a list of Old Norse words in English that I copied from Wikipedia: Aloft, anger, are, awe, awkward, axle, bag, berserk, billow, birth, blunder, both, bulk, bull, bylaw, call, cast, club, crawl, creek, die, dirt, dregs, egg, flit, garth, gawk, get, geyser, gift, girth, give, gosling, guest, gust, hack, haggle, hit, husband, knife, lad, lathe, law, litmus, loose, low, mire, mistake, muck, mug, oat, odd, plough (plow), raft, raise, ransack, reindeer, rive, root, rune, scarf, score, scrap, scrape, seem, skate (fish), skill, skin, skirt, sky, slaughter, sleight, sleuth, snub, stagger, steak, take, talk, tarn, their, they, thorpe, thrift, troll, ugly, wand, want, weak, whirl, whisk, wight, window, wing I found another website at harvard.edu that lists some additional Old Norse words, although some of these cannot be verified by checking the Oxford English Dictionary, as for example, ‘sister’ and ‘skull’, which may be related to, but not derivative of, Old Norse: ban, blend, booth, clip, crazy, fellow, gap, gear, glitter, guess, happen, happy, hurry, ill, lag, leg, lift, link, loan, loft, log, race (footrace), raft, rag, rug, Russ (poetic for ‘Russia’), Russia, sag, scab, scare, scold, sister, skein, skip, skull, smile, stack, them, thrive, thwart, thrust, trust, want, worry, wrong Looking around at random in the OED, I found a few more: edda, saga, snare, snarl, skeet, ski, clutch (of eggs), island, riding (district) Some others that may derive from Old Norse include: eddy, flag (as in ‘flagstone’), lug (pull), nay, oar, swarf, window, wreck Some of the very many closely related specimens are: alder, arse (ass), dreary, otter, scuttle, shame, scythe, shoot, snag, snake, throng. Incidentally, the ‘c’ in ‘scythe’ is historically incorrect. Someone thought the word came from Latin ‘scindere’ (to cut). The word ‘riding’ is still used in Canada as the designation of an administrative district, something like a county; it has nothing to do with horsemanship or equitation. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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