Posted on 11/29/2012 2:59:29 PM PST by Renfield
"Have you considered how easy it is for us Norwegians to learn English?" asks Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. "Obviously there are many English words that resemble ours. But there is something more: its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to Norwegian. We avoid many of the usual mistakes because the grammar is more or less the same.
Faarlund and his colleague Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, now believe they can prove that English is in reality a Scandinavian language, in other words it belongs to the Northern Germanic language group, just like Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. This is totally new and breaks with what other language researchers and the rest of the world believe, namely that English descends directly from Old English. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century....
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
I was always taught that the moon was made of Gjetost.
Who was Alexander Graham Bellski?
I not only failed German in College, I flunked Latin in high school. I wasn’t a very good student but I think those are the only two classes I failed.
I apparently am not very good at verbal learning or whatever it is called.
I am still glad I took Latin as a lot of what I learned has stayed with me. My old Latin teacher, Emmabelle Jones would be shocked I bet.
Even more noted in the case of the ON rein and the OE deer
“whenever you have things grouped together based on similarity it’s always possible for somebody to suggest a different way if grouping them”
Not when historical causation is involved. Then matters of chronology as well as similarites intrude. English cannot be a Scandinavian language if the Ur-form of it already existed before those who spoke it came into extended contact with Scandanavians. It’s well known that both English and the various Scandanavian languages derive from German, and that Germans went en masse to England and the Scandanavians countries before Scandanavians had extended contact with the English.
Did you actually READ the article?
No one is claiming a different history than what is known: England is Anglo-Saxon & Norman, after those 2 groups invaded—and the native Britons moved off to Wales, or intermarried with the Germans and Normans...
HOWEVER, right before the Norman conquest, England was ruled by Denmark for around 30 years—and the researchers claim sentence structure and grammar in English is more similar to Scandinavian languages than it is to German. The researchers are claiming that the basic structure of the LANGUAGE has more in common with Scandinavian languages than German—not anything weird about our history.
I will say that of non-native English speakers, the Scandinavians are the best. I’ve known Swedes that sounded just like Americans.
They told me it was because American movies are not dubbed into Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, as they are in German—so everyone grows up hearing American-accented English in movies from the time they are small children.
It is a mix of all those, and more, but German is first.
I notice that he says Middle English was a product of the merger of Old English and the Scandinavian language spoken in England. I always understood that Norman French was the greatest factor in the shift from Old to Middle English.
" Origin:
1350–1400;
Middle English raynder ( e ) < Old Norse hreindȳri, equivalent to hreinn reindeer + dȳr animal (cognate with deer) "
What, like no other language ever uses more than one word to describe the same thing? Of course there are rules. Maybe more or less strict than other languages, but without rules everyone would sound like a postmodern novel and no one would know what the heck anyone else was talking about.
Not much of a linguist, I’d say.
English is a mix of French, German, and Hebrew, where do they get the scandinavian?
CC
We don’t say himmel, ciel or shamayim, but rather sky.
I hope this doesn’t impact my ability to use the word ‘knave’ in my everyday venacular.
Where did all those French words come from and what can we do about them?
I recently went to Copenhagen on business and prepped with a How to Speak Danish book and CD and was surprised at how difficult it was. I easily learned Spanish later in life after having taken French in high school but Danish is at a whole other level. It’s not the grammar but the pronunciation, which is brutal. In fact I would generally agree with this guy’s theory that the grammer is remarkably similar to English. English is sort of like a scandinavian language with a simplified accent. The Danes I know had no problem learning English but I found it much tougher the other way around.
* English and Scandinavian can have a preposition at the end of the sentence.
[clip]
“But why the inhabitants of the British Isles chose the Scandinavian grammar is something we can only speculate on,” says Jan Terje Faarlund.
(adopting mechanical voice...) Resistance is futile; your language will be assimilated.
Barry Farber, radio guy, suggests learning Norwegian first. He says it’s easier than Danish or Swedish, and once you know Norwegian, picking up those other languages won’t be so hard. Some people say Swedish is easier, but Norwegians have less trouble understanding the other Scandinavian languages than Swedes or Danes do.
English is part a)Celtic by way of the natives of the British Isles (at the time of the Romans), b)Latin by way of the Romans, c)Germanic by way of the Angles, d)Germanic by way of the Saxons, e)Germanic-Scandanavian by way of the Norse, f)Germanic-Frankish-Latin-French-Norse by way of the Normans, e)with adoptions by other sources as well.
English will be the world language, as it has already proven itself the most adaptable langauge - it readily absorbs words from everywhere while maintaining an “English” core.
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