Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch: A contribution to the study of the linguistic relations of English and ScandinavianFlom, George T. (George Tobias)
History
Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch: A contribution to the study of the linguistic relations of English and Scandinavian
Flom, George T. (George Tobias)
Scots language; Scots language -- Foreign words and phrases -- Scandinavian
Worsaae's list of 1400 place-names in England gives us an idea of
the extent, as well as the distribution of Scandinavian settlements
in the 9th and 10th centuries. How long Scandinavian was spoken in
England we do not know, but it is probable that it began to merge
into English at an early date. The result was a language largely
mixed with Norse and Danish elements. These are especially prominent
in the M.E. works "Ormulum," "Cursor Mundi," and "Havelok." We have
historical records of the Danes in Central and Eastern England. We
have no such records of Scandinavian settlements in Northwestern
England, but that they took place on an extensive scale 300 place-
names in Cumberland and Westmoreland prove. In Southern Scotland,
there are only about 100 Scandinavian place-names, which would
indicate that such settlements here were on a far smaller scale than
in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, or Cumberland--which inference, however,
the large number of Scandinavian elements in Early Scotch seems to
disprove. I have attempted to ascertain how extensive these elements
are in the literature of Scotland. It is possible that the
settlements were more numerous than place-names indicate, that they
took place at a later date, for instance, than those in Central
England. Brate showed that the general character of Scandinavian
loanwords in the Ormulum is East Scandinavian. Wall concludes that
it is not possible to determine the exact source of the loanwords in
modern English dialects because "the dialect spoken by the Norsemen
and the Danes at the time of settlement had not become sufficiently
differentiated to leave any distinctive trace in the loanwords
borrowed from them, or (that) neither race preponderated in any
district so far as to leave any distinctive mark upon the dialect of
the English peasantry." It is true that the general character of
the language of the two races was at the time very much the same,
but some very definite dialectal differentiations had already taken
place, and I believe the dialectal provenience of a very large
number of the loanwords can be determined. Furthermore, the
distribution of certain place-names indicates that certain parts
were settled more especially by Danes, others by Norsemen. The
larger number of loanwords in Wall's "List A" seem to me to be
Danish. My own list of loanwords bears a distinctively Norse stamp,
as I shall show in Part III. of this work. This we should also
expect, judging from the general character of Scandinavian place-
names in Southern Scotland.
2. PLACE-NAMES AND SETTLEMENTS IN NORTHWESTERN ENGLAND.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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