# Scandinavian languages: Low German loans



## Gavril

I recall reading that around half the vocabulary of Swedish has been loaned from Low German, and that the distribution of loanwords is similar in Norwegian and Danish. Do you (i.e., speakers of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish) know if this is accurate?

Also, due to this Low German influence, are the modern Scandinavian languages relatively intelligible (in writing, if not in speech) to speakers of modern German or Dutch?

Thanks for any info on this.


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## Tjahzi

My spontaneous reaction would be that yes, this does indeed seem accurate. (I've heard/read it too, and a quick observation more or less confirms it.)

Being a North Germanic speaker, I obviously can't verify the intelligibility of these languages for a continental West Germanic speaker. However, I can provide the following more or less interesting and relevant information on the subject.

Since all Swedes are obliged to study a second foreign language (English obviously being the first) starting from class 5 or 6, many Swedes have at least some knowledge of German. According to my observations, the people that studied French and Spanish (the other two languages to choose between) usually forget most of what they learned after 5-15 years (unless they have a special interest), whereas those who studied German maintain a relatively high level of understanding, even if they don't practice it very much (however, the ability to express oneself naturally declines).
However, the question of "pure" intelligibility is interesting. I've traveled in Germany with people that never studied German, and they usually don't understand much, but mostly because they don't expect to understand, I believe. If you make them read signs and headlines, compare the words and guess, they manage to deduct the meaning rather often, but the very process is unnatural to them. That said, I studied German myself and I'm a fanatic phonologist, so maybe these things are really hard for the average language learner, but they really don't seem so to me.
Spoken German is hard. I'm very bad with spoken language in general, but I find it very tiresome to listen to a 1+ minute conversation, but having one myself at a slow pace is not much of a problem, regardless of the subject.

As for Dutch, it's more or less the same situation, but both tendencies are stronger.
I understand written Dutch quite well because there are many similarities to Swedish and because I've studied German. My personal observation is that had I studied Dutch instead of German, my comprehensibility of it had been greater than my current of German, that is, Dutch is slightly more similar to Swedish than German is, some of the sound changes that occurred in German effected neither Dutch nor Swedish and so on.
However, my comprehensibility of spoken Dutch is very limited. Even though I could probably transcribe a written Dutch text quite well, my brain just can't make the same decoding from oral speech fast enough for me to understand it. Also, I never fully penetrated the Dutch vowel system, which obviously is a bit more complicated than the German.

All in all, despite the increased understanding of Dutch that my German studies have given me, I wish I had studied Spanish or French since that would have meant that I would have had a much greater Romance vocabulary. Dutch and German should be easily acquired even with the basic set of North Germanic vocabulary.

Regarding the other way around, all I can say is that speakers of Dutch and German that emigrate to Sweden tend to learn Swedish very well (only behind Norwegian and Danes, and on pair with Icelanders). The most obvious example being a girl I encountered in high school. She became more or less fluent in about six months. (In fact, she spoke so well, that people occasionally used too slangy words or spoke too unclearly for her to understand, because they virtually "forgot" that she wasn't native.)
I don't know how comprehensible written Swedish is for a West German that hasn't studied it beforehand, but I'm very curious to find out. I reckon the suffixation of the articles and the different vowel setup might pose a challenge.

All in all, I'm of the impression of that the degree of mutual intelligibility between Swedish/Norwegian/Danish and German/Dutch is relatively high in writing, but not so high when it comes to the spoken language. However, should a speaker of either language group try to learn a language of the other, odds are that they would be quite successful. 

Again, this was all just _my _analysis.


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## Cerb

I find what Tjahzi said about retaining language skills very interesting. I know several people that never took much interest in learning German (edit: but studied it over French/Spanish) at school, but still understand German fairly well. At least to the point where they can make out the general content of a conversation.

Low German and Dutch in particular isn't very understandable to Scandinavians, but getting past a few hurdles appears to help a lot. Getting a feel for word order, the use of cases as well as learning a few basic words helps considerably as it enables you to understand things through the shared vocabulary.


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## cocuyo

I think it might be really difficult to tell which way loans have been going. In many cases it is rather clear, while in other it is not. Obviously, while the Hansa was operating in the Baltic and there were tight connections between the seafaring nations of Northern Europe, a lot was picked up from Low German or Dutch, and half the vocabulary seems reasonable, although we should not forget that all Germanic languages have mutual roots. Loans should be expected primarily in technical contexts, in a rather wide sense. Then it is rather obvious that some of the loans have gone the other way, particularly during the time of the vikings, when vikings reigned over large parts of the British Isles and even tried invading France. Several naval terms came from the vikings into other languages, and some of them came back with the Hansa tradesmen and the Dutch shipbuilders a few hundred years later. Also administrative and legal terms went from vikings to other cultures. I think there's a maze that is very difficult to untangle. We might have a propensity for believing that similar words in Low German were loaned into Nordic languages, but it might be the other way around. It's like the linguists that apply even the most remote guesses to prove that any foreign-appearing word in English should be derived from Latin in some way. My pet peeve in that respect is "leisure", which is officially linked to Latin "licere", although the explanation is quite unlikely; French soldiers had "permission", nothing that would be derived from "licere" (note that Latin c would probably be pronounced k), while OF "leisir" is a compound Gaelic word: la saor -> genitive lae saoir (pronounced as F "leisir")= free day. 

So it's no wonder that about half the vocabulary of Low German (or High German) and Nordic languages would coincide. But who could tell which way the loans went?


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## berndf

cocuyo said:


> So it's no wonder that about half the vocabulary of Low German (or High German) and Nordic languages would coincide. But who could tell which way the loans went?


We are talking here about an relatively late development starting in the 14th century. We should therefore be able to reconstruct the development from attestations rather from mere reconstructions. I know too little about the history of Scandinavian languages to give an informed opinion of my own but  I am confident that scholars have done there due diligence when making assertions about things you can study from primary sources. I cannot judge how serious this guy is  but there is certainly enough concrete information and bibliographic links in it for further reading.

The influence of Low German speaking Hanse merchants on Scandinavian languages has been mentioned as a possible explanation for a high number of Low German loans. Two other significant source of Low and High German influence has not yet been discussed:
a) From the 15th to the 19th century, German and Frisian speaking Schleswig-Holstein was part of the Danish kingdom and political and cultural influence of Schleswig-Holsteiners in the realm was significant.
b) The dominance of the Lutheran denomination on Scandinavian Christianity brought with it German language influence much like Dutch Calvinist influence created Dutch language influence on varieties of German spoken in Northern Germany.



cocuyo said:


> My pet peeve in that respect is "leisure", which is officially linked to  Latin "licere", although the explanation is quite unlikely; French  soldiers had "permission", nothing that would be derived from "licere"  (note that Latin c would probably be pronounced k), while OF "leisir" is  a compound Gaelic word: la saor -> genitive lae saoir (pronounced as  F "leisir")= free day.


I cannot leave this uncontradicted. You would have a point there, if _leisir _weren't also attested as a verb in OF (and _loisir_ in early Modern French) with the meaning "being permitted", i.e. _licere_. In addition, the noun _loisir_ still carries the ancient meaning of _being at liberty to do_: Sample sentence of this meaning from the dictionary of the French academy for this meaning: _Il avait tout loisir de refuser ma proposition_.


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## hanne

This thread could also have been posted in Etymology and History of Languages, where it might attract opinions from other/more users.

Gavril, if you want it to be moved there, just let us know.

[edit]You may want to look at this thread: German-Danish dialect continuum on a related topic.[/edit]


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## Gavril

cocuyo said:


> Several naval terms came from the vikings into other languages, and some of them came back with the Hansa tradesmen and the Dutch shipbuilders a few hundred years later. Also administrative and legal terms went from vikings to other cultures.



Did you have any particular administrative / legal terms in mind? I know that English has taken words of this kind from North Germanic (for example, _law_), but I wasn't aware of any such loans in German or Dutch.


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## Dan2

Gavril said:


> Also, due to this Low German influence, are the modern Scandinavian languages relatively intelligible (in writing, if not in speech) to speakers of modern German or Dutch?


I don't think the Scandinavian languages, in normal conversation, are at all intelligible to a monolingual German.

As for in written form: I'm not a native speaker of German, so I can't say with certainty, but I feel that aside from newspaper and technical text (where the pan-European vocabulary helps one get the gist), a monolingual German would have very poor comprehension of written Scandinavian text.

I wrote the following little "story" using only very common Norwegian words.  My guess is that one would understand almost nothing based on a knowledge of German, either because cognates don't exist in German or because cognate words have drifted so far apart in the two languages.   (I admit that in a couple of cases, given the choice between a word  that  reminded me of a German word, and a common Scandinavian word, I  chose  the latter. And errors in the Norwegian are certainly possible, but they shouldn't affect the validity of this exercise.)  

Vennen min, som er lege, og hans tjuesju år gammel kone (en veldig vakker kvinne), sier at deres to små barn skjønner alt, når jeg forteller dem hvordan fly flyr eller hvor bjørner bor (men ikke om jeg snakker på tysk).  I går gikk de...

 (If a German speaker finds this text at all understandable, please say how you decoded what you understood, based on German!)


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## berndf

*Thread moved to EHL.*


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## berndf

Dan2 said:


> Vennen min, som er lege, og hans tjuesju år gammel  kone (en veldig vakker kvinne), sier at deres to små barn skjønner alt,  når jeg forteller dem hvordan fly flyr eller hvor bjørner bor (men ikke  om jeg snakker på tysk).  I går gikk de...


There is one very  obvious Low German loan in it. I wonder if you can spot it (it is not "tysk").



Dan2 said:


> (If a German speaker finds this text at all understandable, please say how you decoded what you understood, based on German!)


Completely impossible. Neither High nor Low German is sufficient to guess the meaning of the text.  But this text is not really representative: First, Norwegian is more difficult to read for a German than Swedish and certainly than Danish. Second, there are unusually many key words with no obvious German cognates (ven, lege, kone, kvinne) for such a short text.


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## Alxmrphi

I know it's not completely relevant (not being Scandinavian), but there was on excerpt on Icelandic influence that mentions Danish and Low German, which could be relevant to what you're looking for. Here are the relevant pages, p. 33-34 mainly.


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## cocuyo

berndf said:


> There is one very  obvious Low German loan in it. I wonder if you can spot it (it is not "tysk").



I would guess that it might be the verb "fortelle" (German: erzählen, English: tell), the cognate of which btw is "translate" in Dutch (vertalen). The Swedish verb is "berätta", cognate with German "berichten".

It is genarally considered that the prefixes for-, för-, be-, er- and perhaps some more are loaned from German into Nordic languages - however they may be adjoined to words of Nordic roots.


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## Alxmrphi

cocuyo said:


> It is genarally considered that the prefixes for-, för-, be-, er- and perhaps some more are loaned from German into Nordic languages - however they may be adjoined to words of Nordic roots.


 
Yeah that's exactly what page 34 of my link says, just before 1.3.4..


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## Dan2

Gavril said:


> I recall reading that around half the vocabulary  of Swedish has been loaned from Low German, and that the distribution of  loanwords is similar in Norwegian and Danish.


An interesting analogy: More than half of the English vocabulary is Romance borrowings, but if I wrote a simply-worded story about a friend and his twenty-seven-year-old wife and their small children ..., a Romance-only speaker would understand almost nothing.


Dan2 said:


> Vennen min, som er lege, og hans tjuesju år gammel kone (en veldig vakker kvinne), sier at deres to små barn skjønner alt, når jeg forteller dem hvordan fly flyr eller hvor bjørner bor (men ikke om jeg snakker på tysk).  I går gikk de...


Although it wasn't my intention, I noticed the following interesting aspect of this text: The words for "he", "beautiful", and "old" are present, but if a German guessed they were "er", "skjønner", and "alt", he'd be wrong in every case. (And "hans" isn't "Hans"...)

I think it's worth mentioning that altho this text is unintelligible based on German, I'm sure that it will be quite transparent to Danes and Swedes.  (Or rather, that any difficulties they have will be due to my shortcomings in the Norwegian.)  So there really is a close clustering of languages (the North Germanic) that are quite some "distance" from the West Germanic.

As for Berndf's low-German word, I would guess "gammel" (since it's a Dutch word), with some meaning drift.


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## berndf

cocuyo said:


> I would guess that it might be the verb  "fortelle" (German: erzählen, English: tell), the cognate of which btw  is "translate" in Dutch (vertalen). The Swedish verb is "berätta",  cognate with German "berichten".
> 
> It is genarally considered that the prefixes for-, för-, be-, er- and  perhaps some more are loaned from German into Nordic languages - however  they may be adjoined to words of Nordic roots.





Dan2 said:


> As for Berndf's low-German word, I would guess "gammel" (since it's a Dutch word), with some meaning drift.


I meant "snakke". This verb (Low German "snacken" or under High German influence "schnacken") with the meaning "to talk, to chat" is specifically Low German. In this meaning, it doesn't exist in other West-Germanic languages.
PS: "Gammel" has an ON etymon. It is not a loan.


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## Gavril

Alxmrphi said:


> Yeah that's exactly what page 34 of my link says, just before 1.3.4..



On p.34, the author says that many loans (from LGerm. and Danish, I think, based on the context) have the prefixes _for-_ and _bí-_, but I don't think he/she is saying that the prefixes themselves necessarily come from German.

It probably is true that _bí-_ is not a native Icelandic prefix, but _for-_ is inherited according to Koebler (link -- scroll down to the entry "for (2)"), even if it has a homophonous (Low) German cognate.


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## Alxmrphi

Oh, didn't know it had to be specifically from German.
To be honest I wasn't really following with close attention, I just remember reading it and it mentioned Low German into Danish then Icelandic and posted it here.



> according to Koebler (link -- scroll down to the entry "for (2)"), even if it has a homophonous (Low) German cognate.


 I have absolutely no idea what that means/says/implies.
I'll take your word for it


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## Gavril

Alxmrphi said:


> Oh, didn't know it had to be specifically from German.
> To be honest I wasn't really following with close attention, I just remember reading it and it mentioned Low German into Danish then Icelandic and posted it here.
> 
> I have absolutely no idea what that means/says/implies.
> I'll take your word for it



What I meant, or what the link means?

I meant that, even if the prefix _for-_ appears in loans from other Germanic languages to Icelandic, Icelandic also has an inherited prefix _for-_ (as seen in _fornafn_ etc.) with the same spelling / pronunciation.

The link is just support for the existence of inherited _for-_.


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## Sepia

I don't really think there is much point in the hypotheses mentioned here as to "what a monolingual German wou understand" or not - this thread is about low German. Where do you find a monolingual Low German speaking person these days? Even those of us who were brought up speaking Low German, Frisian or Danish had to learn High German at an early age too. And once you've learned any one of the regional languages plus High German, it is pretty easy to understand at least simple conversations in any of the two other above mentioned languages.

And besides, (as someone already mentioned) it is probably hard to tell which was the loan went. After all we are talking about langages that developed naturally side by side, an a lot of interaction between the cultural groups that spoke them has been taking place over the past millenium or more.


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## Alxmrphi

> What I meant, or what the link means?


In the link  It's as comprehensible to me as a corrupt Word file.
As for anything else, I wasn't putting across any sort of point, I just read what was "generally" assumed and pointed out relevant details were mentioned in the document (and so it looked to me like details were matching up).
I have absolutely no idea about what was inherited from where, or paths in different languages about anything in this thread, wanted to clear that up.


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> And besides, (as someone already mentioned) it is probably hard to tell which was the loan went. After all we are talking about langages that developed naturally side by side, an a lot of interaction between the cultural groups that spoke them has been taking place over the past millenium or more.


The theories we are discussing here are specifically about loans from MLG and early ModHG (see the link in #5). Those should be traceable with a satisfactory level of accuracy.


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## Dan2

Sepia said:


> I don't really think there is much point in the hypotheses mentioned here as to "what a monolingual German wou understand" or not - this thread is about low German.


Well, the OP did ask:


Gavril said:


> are the modern Scandinavian languages relatively  intelligible (in writing, if not in speech) to speakers of modern German  or Dutch?


And I _do_ find it interesting to learn about this very issue.


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