Native or Borrowed

MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD

1. Historical Background:

The Scandinavian Invasion.

The Norman Conquest.

2. Early ME Dialects and the rise of the London Dialect.

3. ME Literature.

4. Introduction of Printing.

In early Middle English the differences between the regional dialects increased. Dialectal differences in early Middle English were accentuated by such historical events as the Scandinavian invasion and the Norman Conquest.

The Scandinavian Invasion

The Scandinavian Invasion embraces over two centuries. The British Isles were ravaged first by Danes and later by Norwegians in the 8-th century. By the end of the 9-th century the Danes obtained permanent settlement in England. More than half of England was recognized as Danish territory – “Danelaw”. In the early years of the occupation the Danish settlements were little more than armed camps. Later the Danes began to bring their families. The new settlers and English intermarried and intermixed. They lived close together and they intermingled easily as there was no linguistic barrier between them. OE and Old Scandinavian belonged to the Germanic group of languages and at that time were close. The intermixture of the newcomers and English continued from the 9-th century on, during two hundred years.

Scandinavian Place-Names

In the areas of the heaviest settlement the Scandinavians outnumbered the Anglo-Saxon population. In Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Northumberland, Cumberland up to 75% of the place-names are Danish and Norwegian. More than 1400 English villages and towns bear names of Scandinavian origin with the element thorp “village”. e.g. Althorp, Woolthorp, Linthorp or toft “a piece of land”. e.g. Brimtoft, Lowestoft, Eastoft, Nortoft.

Many place-names contain the word thwaite (an isolated piece of land): Applethwaithe, Braithwaite, Cowperthwaite.

Eventually the Scandinavians were absorbed into the local population both ethnically and linguistically.

Due to the contacts and mixture of Old Scandinavian with chiefly Northumbrian and East Mercian, these dialects acquired Scandinavian features.

Native or Borrowed

It is difficult to decide whether a word in Modern E is a native or a borrowed one because of the similarity between Old E and the language of the Scandinavian invaders. Many of the common words of the two languages were identical. But in some case there are very reliable criteria by which we can recognize a borrowed word. The most reliable depend on differences in the development of certain sounds in the North Germanic and West Germanic areas. One of the simplest to recognize is the development of the sound sk. In Old E it was early palatalized to /ò/ (written as sc), except in the combination scr, but in the Scandinavian countries it retained its hard sk sound. So while native words like ship, shall, fish have sh in Modern E, words borrowed from the Scandinavian are generally still pronounced with sk: sky, skin, skill, scrape, scrub, bask. The OE scyrthe has become a shirt, while the corresponding ON form skyrta gives us skirt. The retention of hard pronunciation of k and g in such words as kid, dike, get, give, gild, egg is an indication of Scandinavian origin.

There existed in Middle E the form geit, gait which are from Scandinavian, beside gāt, gōt from the OE word. The native word has survived in Modern E goat.

But modern word bloom could come equally well from OE blōma or Scandinavian blōm. But the OE word meant an “ingot ofiron”, whereas the Scandinavian word meant “flower, bloom”. It happens that the OE word has survived as a term in metallurgy, but it is the Old Norse word that has come down in ordinary use.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16