His noticing some similar words is two things. Norwegian is a separate branch on the north Germanic tree. (some Angles spread north into Scandinavia, just as some spread to the British Isles. So of course there are similarities.
The other thing is that mouch more recently that the Angle’s migrations, Vikings raided and spread much influence in Britian. They left DNA, words, and technology.
But English is not accurately described as descended from Norwegian. Separate tree, with later contacts sharing a few words. And of course, as always, English readily incorporates the new words, as it did with French, Spanish, Latin, etc. This is the strength of English. No rules, and we absorb and grow.
In many cases this is how we wound up with two words for the same thing. “Sick” and “ill” are an example. One is old English, the other is Norse. So we just started using both.
This works for languages and economies.
Yes. I was skeptical till I read this paragraph.
The two researchers show that the sentence structure in Middle English -- and thus also Modern English -- is Scandinavian and not Western Germanic. "It is highly irregular to borrow the syntax and structure from one language and use it in another language. In our days the Norwegians are borrowing words from English, and many people are concerned about this. However, the Norwegian word structure is totally unaffected by English. It remains the same. The same goes for the structure in English: it is virtually unaffected by Old English."
That's a very powerful point. German word order is very different from English and the word order in English does not seem to have been affected by its heavy exposure to the Romans or the Normans though the vocabulary was. Very interesting theory, indeed.
Even more noted in the case of the ON rein and the OE 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.
(adopting mechanical voice...) Resistance is futile; your language will be assimilated.
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.
Fifty-five years ago when I was hanging around with English PhD students at university, they were all talking about being required to study Old Norse. So it was certainly recognized as important a long time ago. Then there is the part of eastern England which is called the Danelaw, because of the Danish influence there and its influence on the laws. Vikings also had an influence, but if the kind of legal scholarship that would have resulted in a name like “Danelaw” was present, it probably would have had more influence on structural things like grammar than the Vikings.