English as a North Germanic language?

[James0289]

I'm sure this has been spoken about on here before, in the dim-and-distant past (rather like the Basque monks), but I thought I would post about it anyway. Within the last few days, an article appeared in the University of Oslo's online newsletter Apollon, claiming that two researchers have concluded English is a North, rather than West, Germanic language.

Have a butcher's.

It doesn't seem to be an entirely new theory, as there was a paper written by Emonds (Faarlund's colleage) in 2010 on the subject (see topmost), and it's probably been around even longer than that, but I have been finding it difficult to come across any more academic sources for it. Naturally, that article in Apollon has been copied, pasted, rewritten and (re-)disseminated over the Web by other journalists as though the theory were widely accepted and gospel truth.

Although I find it compelling, I'm not convinced. The researchers seem to focus only on Old English and modern languages (German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Middle/Modern English) in their comparisons, and only focus on the syntax of these languages. Historical sound changes, morphology and comparisons to languages contemporary with Old English (principally Old Norse) have not been covered.

Despite all that, it does seem an interesting idea, and Emond's article (up to Chapter 8) gives a good socio-linguistic, political and economic account of the changes that were taking place in Anglo-Saxon England after the Viking and Norman invasions... so it's worth a read for that, at least.

[Soap]

No I dont think so, all he's really arguing is that Norse influenced English to a greater degree than most languages influence other languages, and then using that to conclude "English is a Scandinavian language". Might as well argue that French is descended from German since it always puts pronouns before the verb and has an indefinite pronoun derived from its word for "man", just like German.

[Miekko]

No I dont think so, all he's really arguing is that Norse influenced English to a greater degree than most languages influence other languages, and then using that to conclude "English is a Scandinavian language". Might as well argue that French is descended from German since it always puts pronouns before the verb and has an indefinite pronoun derived from its word for "man", just like German.

As always, you fail accurately to represent the argument anyone else presents.

[linguoboy]

As always, you fail accurately to represent the argument anyone else presents.

Okay, Miekko, let's see your attempt at summarising their argument, because I don't find it in the least convincing either. It all seems to rest on some circular assumption of certain syntactic properties as being more immutable than others.

[Gulliver]

This is quite interesting, really. I'm not convinced, but it was a very useful text to have plonked in front of me as I'm currently writing about Old English and language contact for university.

It's a little disappointing that the writer doesn't argue against himself at any point, and a lot of the points are very shallow. There is very little that says that many of the Scandinavian features could not have come about through contact or interlanguage. He just lists features of English and goes ta-dah! at the end. There's no discussion or anything.

He also makes the fairly crucial mistake of comparing English to German. Obviously, English is going to have more in common with descendants of Old Norse than with German, because of the fact that parts of Britain were a Danish colony for a formative part of the development of the language andhas a well-documented portion of its vocabulary with Norse origins, whereas the branch that led to German split from the branches that led to English and the Scandinavian languages fairly early on in the Germanic language family tree. It annoys me when academics do this, I can't help feeling it's just misplaced.

Again, it's interesting but I'm not convinced. If there were another two chapters of discussion about it, contrasting historical dialects and not just the odd sentence here and there from modern German and Swedish, his claim might not seem so half-arsed and fanboyish.

Edit: I've just noticed how few texts he sourced and cited, almost none of which are are on the subject of history. He uses terms like "probably", instead of checking his statements or relying on the knowledge of others. When making statement about the history of a language, it may be pertinent to do a little reading about the people who spoke it.

[James0289]

it was a very useful text to have plonked in front of me as I'm currently writing about Old English and language contact for university

You're welcome. Have a look at the Emonds paper if you haven't already, as that goes into greater detail about the Danelaw, and basically includes the rest of the information as appeared in Apollon, but does so in a publication presented at a conference in 2010 (which would no doubt look better in your references list than, or along with, the Apollon article alone).

[merijn]

I read Emond's paper. He says that Midlle English is an amalgam of Old English and Old Norse, where in the lexicon (in both the functional and the lexical categories) and the morphology old English dominates but Old Norse still has a large presence, but in the syntax it is more like Old Norse. I got the impression that he is a synchronic linguist who had an idea about the development of Middle English, but is not "at home" in historical linguistics. It doesn't mean that what he says is not true, but it left me wondering a few things.
For starters, I want to know how much he deviates from the consensus in his proposal. He presents it as something new, but is the fact that there is an enormous influence from old Norse really new? Another thing is that he constantly compares Middle English with modern languages, and his argument would be more convincing if it were based on a comparison with Middle English and Old Norse; now it is unclear to what extent the similarities between English and Scandinavian are the result of a common ancestor or parallel evolution. And finally I think that the paper suffers from comparing English just with standard Dutch and German, and didn't compare with Dutch and German dialects and Frisian. For instance, Frisian and many dialects of Dutch don't have the past participle marker ge- that is found in both Dutch and German and that is lacking in English. Another interesting parallel is that in Frisian and most Dutch dialects, there is no reflexive that is the cognate of German sich/Dutch zich. In some dialects there is no distinction between the reflexive and the normal personal pronoun, so "he sees him" can mean "he sees him" OR "He sees himself" whereas in other dialects you use a form that is comparable to "his own", so you say "He sees his own" to say "he sees himself". I don't know when English started saying "He sees himself" and not "he sees him". If it happened in the same period that Emond says that Old Norse and Old Enlgish mixed, I think it might be an argument for his thesis that English is North-Germanic syntactically. You could argue that "himself" was created to fulfill the North Scandinavian need for a a distinct reflexive with Old English morphemes, but if it happened later, and in early Middle English you could say "He sees him" for "He sees himself" than this is an area where Middle English is more like West Germanic, more in particular Frisian and some Dutch dialects, than North Germanic.

[Gulliver]

Another interesting parallel is that in Frisian and most Dutch dialects, there is no reflexive that is the cognate of German sich/Dutch zich. In some dialects there is no distinction between the reflexive and the normal personal pronoun, so "he sees him" can mean "he sees him" OR "He sees himself" whereas in other dialects you use a form that is comparable to "his own", so you say "He sees his own" to say "he sees himself". I don't know when English started saying "He sees himself" and not "he sees him". If it happened in the same period that Emond says that Old Norse and Old Enlgish mixed, I think it might be an argument for his thesis that English is North-Germanic syntactically. You could argue that "himself" was created to fulfill the North Scandinavian need for a a distinct reflexive with Old English morphemes, but if it happened later, and in early Middle English you could say "He sees him" for "He sees himself" than this is an area where Middle English is more like West Germanic, more in particular Frisian and some Dutch dialects, than North Germanic.

There are theories that "-self" forms came about from, or were influenced by, Celtic language contact with Old or Middle English. I think a lot of them are about as circumstantial as many of the claims in Emond's paper. One is just as believable as the other, in my opinion. I think his data is sound but his argument is weak. I'd really like to read the imaginary other half of the paper that explains why his examples are stronger than the established trends.

This basically boils down to whether ME came from a very OE-influenced ON (Emond's view), or a very ON-influenced OE (the traditional view) or both and it was a sort of pseudo-creole (which isn't completely unbelievable but has problems) or whether is was actually made by Basque monks. The expression "swings and roundabouts" springs to mind, but academics aren't supposed to say things like that because then most of us would be out of a job and the humanities would go bust. My money's on the monks.

[Miekko]

As always, you fail accurately to represent the argument anyone else presents.

Okay, Miekko, let's see your attempt at summarising their argument, because I don't find it in the least convincing either. It all seems to rest on some circular assumption of certain syntactic properties as being more immutable than others.

Never did I say the professor's argument is sound. I only said Soap misrepresents it even then. Notice the difference, dude.

The professor explicitly claims that OE went extinct and was replaced by a separate NG language, which had OE influences in it. Soap claims he claims something entirely different from that. If you have a read, you'll notice this quite stunning difference, a quite significant marker of Soap's lacking reading ability.

My money's on the professor being wrong. My money likewise is on Soap lacking reading comprehension.

A good study would realize that English shares little to no innovations with the Scandinavian languages, it lacks several innovations shared by all of the Scandinavian languages (synthetic passive, definite article as suffix), and has innovations shared only by ingvaeonic west germanic languages (loss of distinction between reflexive and third person non-reflexive object forms, loss of n before T, c.f. mouth vs. scandinavian mun/mund/etc) and English has innovations not shared by Scandinavian - but does share innovations with WG and specifically Ingvaeonic languages.

[Vuvuzela]

Interesting, but I think Occam's Razor cuts it. Take, for instance, the pronouns. Middle English has one personal pronoun from N.G.,(they) but six from W.G. (We He Ye Thou Ich Hit) and one of dubious, but probably not Nordic origin (Sche), not counting Oblique or Genitive forms.
Also, he uses the infinitive-as-a-separable-preposition thing as evidence, despite the fact that the Norse infinitive marker (in the Norwegian example, "å") is etymologically unrelated to the English "to", albeit semantically similar. This looks to me like a calque, which is something that would be odd for conquered speakers to do on the conquering language as they were adopting it, but makes perfect sense for bilingual speakers trying to speak a second language to do on their native tongue.

[Miekko]

Interesting, but I think Occam's Razor cuts it. Take, for instance, the pronouns. Middle English has one personal pronoun from N.G.,(they) but six from W.G. (We He Ye Thou Ich Hit) and one of dubious, but probably not Nordic origin (Sche), not counting Oblique or Genitive forms.
Also, he uses the infinitive-as-a-separable-preposition thing as evidence, despite the fact that the Norse infinitive marker (in the Norwegian example, "å") is etymologically unrelated to the English "to", albeit semantically similar. This looks to me like a calque, which is something that would be odd for conquered speakers to do on the conquering language as they were adopting it, but makes perfect sense for bilingual speakers trying to speak a second language to do on their native tongue.

Many Scandinavian dialects have infinitive markers that are cognate to 'to', e.g. most North Swedish dialects, and several north Norwegian ones afaict.

[zompist]

This is a journalistic summary rather than a paper, but it looks pretty bad. My first question would be, what do they do to refute Thomason & Kaufman's study in Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics? And they're not even mentioned.

Very briefly, T&K show that Norse influence on English was not unusual for langauge contact, that many of the non-German features of English are shared with all the coastal Germanic languages, and that modern English developed from dialects not under the Danelaw (which never included London).

My guess is that the researchers noticed that English seems closer to Norwegian than to German, and simply forgot that there are any other Germanic languages to look at.

[brandrinn]

What sound changes do Northern Germanic and Anglo-Frisian have in common (that are not of transparently recent origin, and which are not also shared by West Germanic)? I can't find any.

[Abi]

"Like most colonists, the Scandinavian-speaking inhabitants found no reason to switch to the language of the country they had arrived in."

I had no idea French was a scandinavian language.

[linguoboy]

The Language Log smackdown has arrived.

[Anders]

Must English be either West- or North-? Can't it just be said to be a mix?

I have also read somewhere that someone suggested that High German should be classified as South Germanic (-a branch of its own) because of some early distictive development. I think it was some sound changes and maybe something more that I have forgotten.

[linguoboy]

Must English be either West- or North-? Can't it just be said to be a mix?

Not according to the tree model. We don't really have a robust vocabulary for describing the various degrees of language influence which fall well short of the kind of mixing you find in languages like Michif or Media Lengua.

[Drydic]

Besides, English isn't a mix of West and North Germanic. It's a West Germanic language which has a medium smattering of deep loans from old Old Danish. You'd have a far better (though still wrong*) argument that English is a mix of Germanic and Romance.

*blah blah blah what Linguoboy said about lesser levels of language admixture.

[Vuvuzela]

Must English be either West- or North-? Can't it just be said to be a mix?

Not according to the tree model. We don't really have a robust vocabulary for describing the various degrees of language influence which fall well short of the kind of mixing you find in languages like Michif or Media Lengua.

From what I've read of Michif, it looks more like a really systematic form of code-switching (or code-mixing if you prefer) than a proper language. It's original speakers were probably fluent in both Cree and French, and the language does not have a consistent phonology between it's French and Cree elements.
I'm probably wrong, but I don't know why.

[zompist]

Quick summary for those who don't know: Michif has Cree verbs with full Cree inflection including animate/inanimate gender, and French nouns with full french inflection including masculine/feminine gender. It's something that if a conlanger did it we'd call it awkwardly unnatural.

It can't have developed as a pidgin; as Vuvuzela supposes, the original speakers must have been bilingual.

Thomason & Kaufman call it a mixed language, one of only half a dozen examples worldwide.

Part of their whole point is that such languages are very very rare. English is not even remotely close to that level of mixing.

[linguoboy]

It can't have developed as a pidgin; as Vuvuzela supposes, the original speakers must have been bilingual.

Vuvuzela says nothing about it developing as a pidgin. He describes it as "a really systematic form of code-switching", which presupposes bilingualism in the two source languages.

I don't see any reason not to call mixed languages languages in their own right. They sure as hell aren't mutually intelligible with anything else. Are all Michif -speakers synchronically bilingual in both Cree and French? Is the Cree element in Michif indistinguishable from regular Cree, and the French element identical to the local form of French? I'd be surprised if that were true.

[Xephyr]

It can't have developed as a pidgin; as Vuvuzela supposes, the original speakers must have been bilingual.

Vuvuzela says nothing about it developing as a pidgin. He describes it as "a really systematic form of code-switching", which presupposes bilingualism in the two source languages.

Look more closely at the locations of the semicolon and comma.

[Radius Solis]

It can't have developed as a pidgin; as Vuvuzela supposes, the original speakers must have been bilingual.

Yes, but it gets more interesting. Mithun described the genesis of Michif as a situation where bi-ethnic children of, mostly, French trappers and Cree women, were rejected by both groups, and instead of assimilating into one or the other they formed separate communities of their own - where the fact of mixture was central to their identity as a group and they actively sought to maintain and mix both heritages.

Mednyj Aleut formed in similar circumstances; not sure about Media Lengua.

[linguoboy]

It can't have developed as a pidgin; as Vuvuzela supposes, the original speakers must have been bilingual.

Vuvuzela says nothing about it developing as a pidgin. He describes it as "a really systematic form of code-switching", which presupposes bilingualism in the two source languages.

Look more closely at the locations of the semicolon and comma.

Merci. Now I'm just a little confused why Mark was refuting an assertion no one had made, but no matter.

[Vuvuzela]

Media Lengua is mixed in an entirely different way from Mednyj Aleut or Michif. It went ahead and picked a phonology (Quechua), syntax (Quechua), morphology (have I mentioned Quechua?) and lexicon (Spanish). It's still weird that a language would replace all of it's lexicon in this way, with very little harm coming to it's grammar, but it's different from a language having two morphologies, two phonologies, and being split across lines of lexical class, like a pair of conjoined linguistic twins.