Scandinavian Borrowings

Scandinavian words were adopted by the English language after the Scandinavian invasion. The dialects spoken by the invaders and the Anglo-Saxons were closely related to each other. They belonged to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family and had many common features in the spheres of grammar and vocabulary. The language of the invaders could be easily understood by the Anglo-Saxons who made practice of using Scandinavian words. As a result towards the Early ME period a considerable number of Scandinavian words established themselves as part of the English vocabulary. Scandinavian borrowings in the English vocabulary are mainly restricted to the sphere of everyday communication. They are such words as husband, window, fellow, root, bag, birth, sky, law, take, egg, skirt, happy, ill, call, happen, die, hit.

Many of them are rather interesting from the view point of their etymology:

husband < OSc. hūs + bondi (the master of the house);

window < OSc. vind + auga (an eye for wind);

fellow < OSc. fē + lagi (the one who shares a fee).

Some of the Scandinavian borrowings may be recognized by phonetic criteria. Thus, the sound cluster [sk] and the sounds [k], [g] before front vowels are suggestive of the Scandinavian origin of the word. Such words cannot be native as OE [sk], [k] and [g] had been palatalized and turned into [∫], [t∫] and [dZ] (see 041), cf., for example:

By the time of the conquest both the Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons had reached approximately the same level of cultural and social development. Therefore the Scandinavians could not introduce considerable innovations into the life of the Anglo-Saxons. Accordingly most of the borrowed words denoted things familiar to the Anglo-Saxons. In most cases a borrowing had its synonym among the native words. The further development of the synonyms could take different directions.

1. One of the synonyms could replace the other. Thus, Sc. Þeir (they) ousted OE hīe; Sc. kala (call) came to be used instead of OE clipian; Sc. till took the place of OE oþ.

2. Both synonyms could survive in the language. In case of such an outcome the synonyms developed different shades of meaning.

It is interesting to note that some of the Scandinavian words were borrowed because they proved to be more convenient than their English equivalents.

The OE pronoun hīe (they), for example, had a sound form similar to personal pronouns hē (he), and hēo (she). In rapid speech it was difficult to distinguish between them. To avoid such homonymy the language borrowed the Scandinavian pronoun Þeir.

The Scandinavian verb deyia (die) displaced OE steorfan (starve) because its sound form suited the OE words dead (dead) and deoþ (death).