Re: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English
From: Yusuf B Gursey (ybg_at_TheWorld.com)
Date: 01/08/05
- Next message: Peter T. Daniels: "Re: Ubaidian origins ? Help needed !"
- Previous message: Yusuf B Gursey: "Re: arabic lyrics - denia"
- Next in thread: I.E_Johansson: "Re: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English"
- Reply: I.E_Johansson: "Re: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:54:21 +0000 (UTC)
this would be of interest to sci.lang as well:
======================================
From: Paul J Gans <gans@panix.com>
Newsgroups: soc.history.medieval
Subject: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 17:31:41 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID: <crmh1t$apb$1@reader1.panix.com>
In soc.history.medieval Vaughan Sanders
<jamie@chalkwell-windsurfing.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>"Paul J Gans" <gans@panix.com> wrote in message
>news:crl6r7$pdr$8@reader1.panix.com...
>snip
>> The Medieval Review has just e-mailed a review of a new book:
>> Townend, Matthew. _Language and History in Viking Age England:
>> Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old
>> English_. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. ISBN 2-503-51292-5
>>
>> The book takes the view that native old Norse and native
>> old English speakers would have been mutually intelligible
>> (with some difficulty).
>>
>> I'll be glad to post the entire review if anyone is interested.
>>
>I'd be interested, I'm half way through Melvyn Bragg's "Adventure of
>English", so might have some comments.
>I leave it to you on who else is interested, I have to cut a couple of
>ng's to get my server to post.
OK. Here it is:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 06 Jan 2005 17:30:19 -0500
From: The Medieval Review <tmr-l@wmich.edu>
To: tmr-l@wmich.edu
Subject: TMR 05.01.14 Townend,
Language and History in Viking Age England (North)
Townend, Matthew. <i>Language and History in Viking Age England:
Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English</i>.
Turnhout: Brepols, 2002. Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 6. Pp. xii +
248. $75.00 (hb). ISBN 2-503-51292-5
Reviewed by Richard North
University College London
richard.north@ucl.ac.uk
This book begins with a sketch of the Vikings' arrival, conquest and
submission on English soil, which Townend delivers via a snapshot of
entries from the <i>Anglo-Saxon Chronicle</i>. This is followed by nine
varied cases of Anglo-Scandinavian negotiation, which start with
Ealdorman =C6lfred's buying back of the Codex Aureus gospel book from
Vikings in the mid-ninth century, and end with the hoard of a Danelaw
merchant lost some time after 1003. In between are treaties, charter
records of the West Saxon repurchase of Danelaw land, a
<i>Chronicle</i> entry concerning =C6thelstan's gift of his sister's hand
in marriage to King Sigtryggr of York in 925, and some increasingly
complicated legal provisions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All
these cases beg the same question: how did speakers from one language
group make their demands to those of the other? Starkly formulated, it
must be a choice between using interpreters, encouraging bilingualism
among merging groups, or relying more passively on an existing degree
of intelligibility between speakers of English and Danish in the Viking
Age.
Favoring the last option, Townend makes a test for dialect
intelligibility compositely on the basis of four: (i) empirical: the
"Recorded Text Test" (RTT); (ii) anecdotal: "ask the informant"; (iii)
philological; and (iv) social. How these may be applied in the case of
Anglo-Saxon and Danish Norse, both languages in a state more than a
thousand years dead, is not all that improbable. There is (iii) the
history of comparative scrutiny in this area as part of Germanic
philology and (iv) the abundance of historical-archaeological
information concerning Anglo-Scandinavian encounters. There is also
(ii) explicit and implicit anecdotal information in both Anglo-Saxon
and Old Norse sources about the degrees to which various members of one
group could--or thought they should--understand another. Here, in ch. 5
(161, n. 9), I wondered why so little was made out of the Norse
elements in the Viking's speech in <i>The Battle of Maldon</i>. Most
importantly (i), however, Townend makes it clear that an empirical
evidence of mutual intelligibility survives embedded in English
place-names, whether these are Scandinavianized versions of Anglo-Saxon
ones, or vice versa. In short, these four tests are all applied in
Townend's book.
In ch. 2, in order to set out towards this end, there is a brief but
trenchant discussion of some well-worn problems: the chronology of
Germanic dialect formation, the presence of Norwegians in the
fifth-century <i>adventus Saxonum</i>, whether it is a break or
continuation in Anglo-Scandinavian trade from then to the arrival of
Viking raiders in England in the late eighth century. Then, showing
even more remarkable ability to stay within the essentials, Townend
leads us gamely through two potentially dense phonological inventories,
the lists of sound changes in Old English and Old Norse from the time
of their divergence from (and presumably because of) the Anglian and
Saxon migrations to Britain in the fifth century. Not all controversies
can be settled or even addressed in a summary chapter, but the aim of
this one puts such considerations in second place. As well as
demonstrating the isolation of the Old English language from Old Norse
for some 200-250 years before the Viking Age, ch. 2 allows us to
consider "dialect congruity" (41) as a prerequisite for the sound
changes in Scandinavianized English place-names in ch. 3. In this
chapter, which could be described as a breakthrough, Townend brings on
terminology from two modern critical studies of passive dialect
intelligibility: particularly C. F. Hockett's "switching code," which
enables listeners to convert vowels from one related system to another;
and the notion of "dialect congruity" in Margaret and Stuart Milliken,
one which allows such conversions to take place without the listener's
need to study the speaker's dialect as if this were a separate
language. As Townend shows, the conclusions of these modern linguistic
scholars illuminate the process whereby Scandinavians converted
elements in Old English place-names into congruent Danish forms. As may
be studied in a detailed appendix (69-87), there are 228 place-names
from Danelaw and Norwegian areas (in the East Midlands, Yorkshire, and
the North West) in each of which the Old English form is recorded along
with its later Scandinavianization. Out of this number, 36 place-names
show a non-cognate substitution of elements (OIce <i>vi<th>r</i> for OE
<i>wic</i>, for example), leaving 192 in which Norse arrivals switched
their own forms for the cognate indigenous ones (for example,
<i>heimr</i> for OE <i>ham</i>). These substitutions cover a wider area
than one in which this high success-rate, no less than 84%, could be
laid at the door of "a handful of influential linguists" (60). From
these 192 names Townend has deduced a list of 15 separate conversion
patterns involving both consonants and vowels, one which represents
most of the phonemic systems of both Old English and Old Norse (61-3).
This success-rate for the Norse version of Hockett's phonemic
switching-code goes up to 92% (192 out of 207) if place-names are taken
out of the calculation for part of which no Old Norse cognate existed;
and even higher, to 99% (128 out of 129), if the sum total includes
only cognate substitutions in the stressed first element where a Norse
cognate existed (66). Even at 84%, however, Townend's test for ancient
partial place-name conversion works like a modern RTT, demonstrating,
in his careful words, that "in the contact of speakers of Norse and
English in Viking Age England we primarily appear to be dealing with a
situation of dialect intelligibility rather than one of bilingualism"
(60).
Ch. 4 offers the most thoroughgoing analysis of three cases of
Anglo-Scandinavian language exchange. There is firstly the Norwegian
skipper Ohthere's terminology in the passage interpolated into Alfred's
Orosius's <i>Historia adversus Paganos</i>. Here it is persuasively
argued that Ohthere spoke his own form of English without an
interpreter. Then a century later, =C6thelweard, in his <i>Chronicon</i>,
allows his interest in the names of Norse gods to reshape the sequence
of their cognates in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogy. Lastly =C6lfric,
=C6thelweard's protege, goes the other way by suppressing all links
between native and foreign gods and by altering details of Norse
paganism to fit with Roman mythology. The clerical attitude resurfaces
in the final stage of ch. 5, which considers dialect intelligibility in
Norse, Old English and Anglo-Latin records from the anecdotal point of
view. It is firstly surprising to find the Icelandic sagas, notably
<i>Egils saga</i> and <i>Haralds saga Sigur<th>arsonar</i>, supporting
the notoriously trite statement in <i>Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu</i> (ch.
7) that English was formerly one with Danish and Norwegian. Yet it
becomes ever more plausible through these thirteenth-century memories
of the British Isles, that in the Viking Age each community did regard
the other's speech as a variant dialect. Consistent with this is the
fact that the more contemporary Anglo-Latin and vernacular references
to English dealings with Norsemen all omit reference to the
<i>wealhstod</i> ("interpreter"), a figure in regular use with other
language groups. For once it seems that an <i>argumentum ex
silentio</i> may be the right one. At any rate, the vernacular
homilists' retention of the biblical topos in the <i>Carta
dominica</i>, that Israel (i.e. England) could not understand the
speech of northern Chaldean invaders (i.e. the Vikings) is a nice way
of showing that the English clergy did not want to be identified with
the immigrants now living with them, whose language was so close to
theirs.
Townend concludes his book in a characteristically modest style, in ch.
6, before re-entering the fray with a sketch of the history of
Norse-English language relations. In general this is defined as
"societal bilingualism," a term which acknowledges the pragmatic
attempts of Englishmen and Danes to communicate in the tenth and
eleventh centuries within a communal understanding of England as truly
"Anglo-Scandinavian," a country with two languages (we say
<i>Northworthy</i>, you say <i>Derby</i>). The puzzling lack of Norse
place-names or inscriptions in Scandinavian areas is traced to the form
of the written record, or the fact that Norse here had no literary
status of its own. Whether or not it had lost its inflexions by the
time it was inscribed (on the Penningon tympanum, for example, in the
twelfth century) will remain a matter for debate. Yet the position of
Norse words at the core of Middle English vocabulary does suggest, as
Townend wants it to, that the same words were imposed on English in the
Anglo-Saxon period, probably through mixed marriages (204; cf. 184, n.
2). Finally, the many doublets of English and Norse cognates in the
<i>Ormulum</i>, in an autograph manuscript from twelfth-century
Lincolnshire, bear out what Townend has been saying: that it is likely
the two groups had been able to understand each other's language from
the start. In all, his case for a more upbeat view of Anglo-Norse
intelligibility is made with such thoroughness, selectivity and range
that it succeeds in revising much of the last century's scholarship in
favor of the old Edwardian optimism (such as that of Henry Bradley,
<i>The Making of English</i>, 1904). This is a skilful and elegant
book. One can only hope that historians and archaeologists will make it
their new platform for research on England in the Viking Age.
-----------------------------
Enjoy,
---- Paul J. Gans
- Next message: Peter T. Daniels: "Re: Ubaidian origins ? Help needed !"
- Previous message: Yusuf B Gursey: "Re: arabic lyrics - denia"
- Next in thread: I.E_Johansson: "Re: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English"
- Reply: I.E_Johansson: "Re: (LONG) Old Viking and Old English"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ]
Relevant Pages
|
