# English: Relationship to Danish



## srk

I first heard Danish as an American soldier stationed in Germany, on leave, and traveling north by train.  When the train left Hamburg Altona, I was surprised to hear many people speaking English.  It didn't take long to realize that, although it sounded like English, it was not.  It was Danish.

Since then, and not only because of that experience, I became convinced that Danish is, in a sense, an intermediate language between German and English -- that English developed more from Danish than directly from German.  I am not enough of a linguist nor historian to know whether or not this is nonsense.  I can certainly cite examples of phrases in Danish that sound amazingly like their equivalents in English, and very little like German.  There is also the idea that German has three grammatical Genders that permeate the language, Danish has two, and English (arguably) has one.

When I was comfortable in this idea, I bought a book on learning Danish, and was stunned to find how the definite article was handled when there was no descriptive adjective to worry about -- that "the" was essentially hung on the end of the noun.  Danish was suddenly an agglutinative language like Hungarian, which is nowhere on the journey from German to English.

My question is, can anyone shed light on this idea for me?  How did this feature become a fixture in Danish that did not arrive from German and was not communicated to English.  Is it just one of those things that has no explanation other than "that's the way it is", or is there something to know about how these three languages developed that explains what I see as a deviation from a path.  Perhaps there are all kinds of similarly stunning grammatical differences between Danish and the other two, and I'm just not aware of them.


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## Alxmrphi

Hi there, srk.

I have a feeling this might be moved into the Etymology & History of Languages section but maybe not since your question was about the definite article in Danish.
First things first, we have to clear up the myth that English is derived from German. It's a common mistake for people to think that and I believe that has roots in the fact that the name of the language from which all of these languages derive is called (Proto-)*Germanic*. This language is not "German" as we know it today, but a much much older language that was spoken by the Germanic people from about 500BC well into the AD region. Germanic then split as these people migrated westward and northward (I'll ignore the eastern branch for this discussion) and then we have West Germanic and North Germanic. West Germanic then split even further as these people migrated and split and over time the languages changed. The same happened for North Germanic languages.

English, Dutch, German (and some others) all belong to the West Germanic branch of languages and Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian (etc.) all belong to the North Germanic branch. So, naturally, they're closely related and we can see similarities for a bunch of features across all member groups. After the first West Germanic speakers sailed over to England and that language became what we know today as Old English, they lived there for a couple of hundred years before the Vikings sailed over and brought their North Germanic language to our shores. They stayed and had a great influence on the development of English and many features we can attribute to the Vikings' presence in England. This, does not imply that English came from any form of Danish, but rather that Danish had an impact on English (just like how Anglo-French completely transformed English via borrowing words - well over 60% of our vocabulary is from (Anglo-)French).

The first attested language that we know that North Germanic became is Old Norse, and it is in Old Norse that this system of putting definite articles onto the end of nouns first arises. Then, when Old Norse split into East/West Norse, all the daughter languages have elements of this feature. By the time this innovation started, the people who spoke the languages which then became German and English were already completely separated from this group, so that's why German and English doesn't have this feature (because it developed out of a North Germanic language, not a West Germanic one).

Does that help?

It might be worth having a look at this image to get a better idea. If you imagine as you move from top to bottom, that represents time passed, then when you hit "Northern", that's when that feature evolved. That's why English and German don't have this feature and also explains a little bit about how these languages came about.


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## srk

It helps on first reading, and I'm sure it will help much more after I've digested it.  Thanks.

I'm sorry to have started my thread in the wrong place.


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## Alxmrphi

I added in a link to a picture which basically should make it quite clear how to visualise the relationship between them all.


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## timtfj

My guess (just a guess) is that what's now thought of as a definite article added to the end was once simply part of a system of definite and indefinite inflexions. It would then make sense for people to decide at some point that there was no need for a definite artlcle before a word which already had a definite ending.

 It occurred to me recently that German might also have remnants of such a system. You see it in the adjective endings, at least in the nominative case:


indefinite: ein klein*es* Haus (a small house)
definite: das klein*e* Haus (the small house)
The treatment of the adjective seems to me to be exactly the same as in Danish and Norwegian: for the indefinite form, a gender ending is added (klein, kleine, kleines), but for the definite form, an -e is used instead.

If anyone can shed light on this aspect I'd be interested.


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## Alxmrphi

> The treatment of the adjective seems to me to be exactly the same as in Danish and Norwegian: for the indefinite form, a gender ending is added (klein, kleine, kleines), but for the definite form, an -e is used instead.


Good thought process!

There is an article which still exists in Icelandic called *hinn*, which was present in Old Norse. Given the flexibility with which words could move around, it was often that the noun would come first and the article would follow. This is hypothesised to have occurred with such frequency that it underwent a process that linguists call _grammaticalisation_, which is when objects are reanalysed and generally bind together or change in form somehow. This happened in all sorts of places in Icelandic, creating new fricatives at the end of certain declensions because inversion happened so frequently (the ð in þú sér*ð* actually came about by this same process sér*þ*ú -> sér*ð*).

So, it went like this: hest hinn -> hest-inn -> hest-en and then it was eventually reanalysed that this is a basic element of how you make a noun definite and generalised across all nouns. The neuter counterpart to *hinn* was *hitt* and this is were -*et* comes from: hus hitt -> hus-itt -> hus-et.


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## myšlenka

timtfj said:


> My guess (just a guess) is that what's now thought of as a definite article added to the end was once simply part of a system of definite and indefinite inflexions. It would then make sense for people to decide at some point that there was no need for a definite artlcle before a word which already had a definite ending.
> 
> It occurred to me recently that German might also have remnants of such a system. You see it in the adjective endings, at least in the nominative case:
> 
> 
> indefinite: ein klein*es* Haus (a small house)
> definite: das klein*e* Haus (the small house)
> The treatment of the adjective seems to me to be exactly the same as in Danish and Norwegian: for the indefinite form, a gender ending is added (klein, kleine, kleines), but for the definite form, an -e is used instead.
> 
> If anyone can shed light on this aspect I'd be interested.


The difference between a weak (indefinite) declension and a strong (definite) declension of adjectives doesn't have anything to do with the Scandinavian definite noun endings. Strong and weak adjectival declension is something all Germanic languages have in common (except for English and perhaps Afrikaans) so it is a feature that is older than the Scandinavian definite noun endings. The two features developed independently.


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## srk

The volume of your response and how quickly it came says that you’ve told this story often.  What’s surprising is that you’re able to tell it again without sounding impatient at my ignorance.

This is just to let you know that I’m glad for the information.  I have to look at it a lot harder before I can respond in a way that lets you know I really appreciate what you’ve told me.

timtfj’s  comparison between adjectives preceded by definite and indefinite articles in German and Danish definite and indefinite endings lit a light for me that I’d like to keep lit somehow in spite of myšlenka’s cold water.  That’s just one of many things I’ll think about before responding again.  Alxmrphi’s procedural formula for getting from hinn to -en and hitt to -et will stick with me.

I suppose I’m blind to the endings that Dan2 points out partly because I think they have counterparts in all of (the few) languages I’m familiar with, whereas a definite ending does not, and partly because people always miss the obvious in their native language.

Thank you all.  (I didn’t miss the relationship tree even though it was added to Alxmrphi’s first post.)


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## NorwegianNYC

srk said:


> There is also the idea that German has three grammatical Genders that permeate the language, Danish has two, and English (arguably) has one.
> 
> Danish was suddenly an agglutinative language like Hungarian, which is nowhere on the journey from German to English.



Hi!

Danish, nor any of the Scandinavian languages are agglutinative - they are syntactic language. English is also a syntactic language, but not to the extent the other Germanic languages are. The evidence lies in words like "someone", "summertime" and "into". A trait in syntactic languages is that they can make compounds, but not string together sentences into single words.

A feature in Scandinavian (especially in dialects) is that one syllable words in Neuter often does not take an ending (in indefinite). English has a similar feature in such words as sheep, salmon, deer etc., and although this is often regarded as a grammatical anomaly, it can just as well be regarded as a grammatical "gender". However, it is important to remember that the word "gender" does not mean "sex" (physical gender); it simply means "different". With that in mind - if we can disregard the notion that grammatical gender needs to be the old Latin M, F and N - it can be said that English actually has a two gender system.


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## Wilma_Sweden

srk said:


> I'm sorry to have started my thread in the wrong place.


Don't worry! I'm conferring with the EHL mods if they feel non-Scandinavian speakers may have something to add, in which case they'll probably move it. If not, it can stay here.


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## myšlenka

NorwegianNYC said:


> A feature in Scandinavian (especially in dialects) is that one syllable words in Neuter often does not take an ending (in indefinite). English has a similar feature in such words as sheep, salmon, deer etc., and although this is often regarded as a grammatical anomaly, it can just as well be regarded as a grammatical "gender". However, it is important to remember that the word "gender" does not mean "sex" (physical gender); it simply means "different". With that in mind - if we can disregard the notion that grammatical gender needs to be the old Latin M, F and N - it can be said that English actually has a two gender system.


It's a side-point in this thread but claiming that English has a two gender system sounds a little far-fetched to me. The English irregular plurals should be considered grammatical anomalies or accidents of history because they are unproductive. I would even go so far as to claim that English doesn't even have one grammatical gender because you need at least two genders (or noun classes if you prefer) for the grammatical category to exist in a speaker's mind.


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## vestfoldlilja

I read an interesting article yesterday (http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/-Engelsk-er-et-skandinavisk-sprak-7055551.html, in Norwegian) about a theory that English derives directly from the Scandinavian languages and not their west-Germanic counterpart. It’s a theory by linguistics Jan Terje Faarlund (University in Oslo) and Joseph Emmonds (a guest professor from Palacky University). 

Points made in the article: 

Norwegians (Scandinavians) learn English quite easily. It goes beyond similar looking words. Mistakes common for other foreign learners are avoided because the grammar is very similar because the structure base in the Scandinavian languages and English is alike. 

The two professors say they can prove that English in reality is derived from the Scandinavian language and as such belong to the north-Germanic language group. This goes against the status quo that states that English derives from old-English (Anglo-Saxon). Old English is the Language spoken in Britain. It’s a west-Germanic language that was bought from North Germany and South Jylland. The professors believe that modern English directly derives from the Scandinavian languages spoken by the Danes and Norwegians that settled and stayed there for many years before the French speaking Normans came in 1066. 

Old English and modern English are two very different languages. The professors believe old English died out while Scandinavian, strongly influenced by old English, survived.  The relationship between the British and the Scandinavians overall where hostile, but the descendants from the Vikings got control over much land in the west and north, and Nordic chieftains ruled for haft a century. The Nordic speaking population did not change their own tongue and continued to speak their own languages. 

In the time period before the Normans arrived, the living conditions where bad and the two people groups (British and Nordic) melted together. This also meant that their languages changed and middle-English came to be. This new language had a great many Scandinavian words; like took, knife, cut and steak. It’s interesting to note that the most common thing when languages merge does not happen here. It’s more common to take in use loan words – words and phrases for new things. This is not the case here. It is common, every day words that derives from the Scandinavian languages. Like: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain. Scientists believe that old English had their own words for most of these. 

It is also common for a language to keep its own grammar when connecting with another language. This did not happen. In England old Germanic words and morphemes where put aside while their Scandinavian counterparts were taken into use, and live on in Modern English.  The two professors also believe that the way sentences is build derives from Scandinavian and not West-Germanic. It is not common to borrow syntax and structure. The syntax and structure of English has little in common with Old-English. One example of this: object after verb: I have just read the book. West-Germanic languages (including old English) will put the verb at the end the sentence.


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## Alxmrphi

> I read an interesting article yesterday (http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/ir...k-7055551.html, in Norwegian) about a theory that English derives directly from the Scandinavian languages and not their west-Germanic counterpart. It’s a theory by linguistics Jan Terje Faarlund (University in Oslo) and Joseph Emmonds (a guest professor from Palacky University).


I saw that article make the news yesterday, and was thinking about mentioning it as an anecdotal point.
In reality though, it's the biggest pile of nonsense I've ever seen. They offer nothing academic and at best and make outlandish claims while there is a whole host of evidence that goes against them. This happens now and then and more often than not it's just to get into the news cycle for the day. The languages did merge in some respects (i.e. English borrowing the plural pronouns) and the third person [s] is said to have its roots in the -as passive construction from North Germanic, but we just see too much linguistic diversity that has so many differences that exist in the major kingdoms in Old English to take something that has passed through Norse to be the root language of English.

The diversity of English from Kent to Northumbria would not have occurred if it wasn't a process of slowly-diverging local dialects on the continent that had a few hundred years to change. If you have a group of North Germanic speakers that land in a place and then spread out, there would be a lot more uniformity in structure than the evidence shows us. Old English has a LOT of things that you see in Dutch and German that aren't typical of North Germanic. It just doesn't add up, at all. I am still half-convinced it's an article in jest. I saw about a dozen linguists post links to articles on different sites that talked about the story with commons such as, "Oh, right." / "Well, glad they cleared that up." / "Well whaddaya know?" Nobody is taking it seriously from what I can see.


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## NorwegianNYC

myšlenka said:


> It's a side-point in this thread but claiming that English has a two gender system sounds a little far-fetched to me. The English irregular plurals should be considered grammatical anomalies or accidents of history because they are unproductive. I would even go so far as to claim that English doesn't even have one grammatical gender because you need at least two genders (or noun classes if you prefer) for the grammatical category to exist in a speaker's mind.


Hi Myslenka,

It is a little far-fetched, and I am not proposing we go ahead and introduce grammatical genders in English! I do however find it interesting that there is a group of nouns that take a different, although corresponding pattern in plural. Perhaps it all boils down to how we look at grammatical gender, and perhaps I better avoid the word "gender" (although the word actually means "sort" or "class"), and consider noun classes (as you say) instead. Traditionally, English has been regarded as having no grammatical gender, since it has no M/F/N or C/N distinction, but if we look at other languages, a noun class can be much more than that.


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## myšlenka

NorwegianNYC said:


> Hi Myslenka,
> 
> It is a little far-fetched, and I am not proposing we go ahead and introduce grammatical genders in English! I do however find it interesting that there is a group of nouns that take a different, although corresponding pattern in plural. Perhaps it all boils down to how we look at grammatical gender, and perhaps I better avoid the word "gender" (although the word actually means "sort" or "class"), and consider noun classes (as you say) instead. Traditionally, English has been regarded as having no grammatical gender, since it has no M/F/N or C/N distinction, but if we look at other languages, a noun class can be much more than that.


Hi NorwegianNYC,
yes I agree. The Indo-European M/F/N distinction is unfit for describing noun classes cross-linguistically. Whatever the basis for noun class distinction may be, the key point is productivity. I suspect that speakers of English would add an -s when asked to give the plural of new lexical items because that's the productive way of forming plurals in English.
I can easily come up with a bunch of verbs (in my dialect) where a long -i- in the stem changes to -ei- in the past tense (skrive, bli, drive, skrike, snike, svi, gni, bite, hive, slite, rive....) but I wouldn't suggest that this class should be considered regular, in spite of corresponding patterns.


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## srk

Alxmrphi and Dan2:

I think you’ve pretty much set me straight.  However, Dan2, talking about Proto Germanic as a “_hypothesized_ earlier language”, together with the article from Aftenposten summarized by vestfoldlilja, worry me.  But I’m too old to make a success out of getting off my butt and making an exploration of these ideas myself.  I’m going to have to trust you two.  (Don’t let me down.)  I hope that the hypothetical nature of Proto Germanic is that no one knows what it looked like, not whether or not such a language existed at all.

Alxmrphi:

I didn’t quite think of current-day German as an immutable seed language spreading north and west and being modified by people who were initially speechless.  I imagined it, instead, to be the least altered from some starting point, and I gather from you that I was wrong about that as well.  The geography helped my myth along.  I also hear you when you say that you consider that the recent assertions about English coming directly from Scandinavian languages are so much snake oil.

Regarding,

“This does not imply that English *came from* any form of Danish, but rather that Danish *had an impact* on English (just like how Anglo-French completely transformed English via borrowing words - well over 60% of our vocabulary is from (Anglo-French).”:

If “had impact” is the better descriptor than “came from”, the result is nonetheless dramatic in terms of structure as well as vocabulary.  I have the idea that the influence of French on English, while extensive, is mainly at the high-blown end of the vocabulary — that when we’re in real trouble, we holler “help”, not “assistance”.  (Of course, that’s someone else’s smart remark.  I just don’t have an attribution.)  I still have the idea that the influence of Nordic languages is more fundamental.

Thinking about your description of how “hesten” and “huset” developed leads me to wonder if the reason these forms did not contribute to the impact of Nordic languages on English, was because they were hard to hear and make sense of if you were listening in a language that already had separated definite articles preceding their nouns.  The forms were a surprise to me precisely because I hadn’t really _heard_ them in all the listening that preceded my seeing them in writing.

Dan2:

I was already aware of the lack of verb conjugation as a remarkable feature of Danish grammar.  However, when I started the thread, I was ready to call this evidence of its closeness to English, as there is much less difference between English verb forms marking person than there is in German.  I didn’t make this argument, because I would have had to explain the residual differences in English, particularly in the verb “to be”, and I certainly don’t know how to do that.  At times, I’ve thought that this feature of Danish is so startling that the explanation must be that at some point it was legislated, as new orthographies are.

You said that “English is in some ways closer to German (and even more so to Dutch) and in some ways closer to the Scandinavian languages”.  Because you gave me no other examples of how the former is true, I took your illustration of lack of gender marking in the predicate adjective in German as an intended example.  I can’t see that as evidence, because there isn’t _any_ gender marking of adjectives in English.  You can clear that up just by saying that I’m putting words in your mouth, but I would have liked to have examples.

timtfj:

After all, I can’t see your example of adjective declension in German as a remnant of a more extensive system.  It seems to me to be rather an effort to touch up a deficient system — to identify noun gender where the indefinite article is of no help, rather than dropping an ending where none is needed.  In fact, this was the mnemonic given to me for coming to terms with descriptive adjectives when I was taught German.  If this misses the point, please say so.

I’ll take myšlenka’s word that this feature developed independently from that of definite noun endings.

myšlenka:

“The English irregular plurals should be considered grammatical anomalies or accidents of history because they are unproductive.”  I puzzled over the word “unproductive” in your sentence, wondering whether it was a term that had special meaning in linguistics rather than an ordinary use of the word.  I decided on the latter — that you are saying that it is not a useful or helpful exercise to consider irregular plurals as forming an additional gender.  Is that right or wrong?

At least, I look at the terms “masculine, feminine”, and “neuter” as grammatical labels in this way.  I think it is undeniable that the terms began based on an idea of “which sex” or “the lack of either”, but that it is unproductive to think of them as other than mere labels in sorting out and correctly handling the entirety of nouns.  (If there was ever an unhelpful term for labeling grammatical gender, I think it has to be the word “common” for the common gender in Danish.  In what sense are the common nouns common?)


NorwegianNYC:

It is difficult for me to follow a lot of what you say.  (I’m not trying to be rude.  I just need some clarification.)  I don’t know whether you are saying Scandinavian languages are or are not agglutinative.  It sounds at first that you are saying they are not — that they are “syntactical” instead — but agglutination, where it occurs, is certainly part of syntax.

I don’t have any illusions about Danish being agglutinative to the extent that Hungarian is.  It was a beginning impression when I started to learn and was based on the earliest instruction in the text I was using.  It was not an impression that was supported as I read further.  It may have been pointless of me to talk about it in that way at all in this thread.  I could just as well have said that this feature of Danish was surprising to me and left it at that.

I don’t understand what you’re saying about “sheep, salmon” and “deer”.  These do not form their plural by adding “s”, but I don’t know what this has to do with noun gender.  I see gender as a sorting mechanism for deciding how nouns and their modifiers are to be handled grammatically, most importantly with respect to case.  Are you saying that, because “the plural” can be thought of as separate gender because of its distinctive handling with regard to case — that nouns not using final “s” in the plural should belong to still another gender?  If you want to regard “salmon” and “horse” as having different grammatical gender because of how they form their plural, what about nouns that are uncountable like “jewelry”?  You’d have to add many more genders to German if your criterion is the way in which plurals are formed.



vestfoldlilja:

Thanks for the link to the article and your summary.  When I read them, I thought I was going to be a hero after all for starting this thread.  (I know you will have read Alxmrphi’s opinion.)

Wilma_Sweden:

Thanks for protecting me as long as you could.

Everyone:

I know you aren’t particularly looking for a response from me.  I can tell when the dope who started the thread (that would be me) has been elbowed aside so that the experts can take sides and talk to one another.  (I really have no problem with that.)

In my initial post, I meant to let you know that I am at least smart enough to realize that Danish is closely related to other Nordic languages. I just never got around to turning that corner.  I know that Danes and Norwegians understand one another with no difficulty.  Moreover, years ago, I would try samples of the little Danish I knew on Swedes I worked with, would be understood, and would mostly understand their responses.  Because Danish is the only Scandinavian language I have any real experience with, it is the language I had to talk about.


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## Alxmrphi

Wow, what a post! I'll try and be as concise as I can be to the points you directed my way.



> I hope that the hypothetical nature of Proto Germanic is that no one knows what it looked like, not whether or not such a language existed at all.


Exactly! We know it existed but we don't have any physical evidence of what it looked like. There are very solid principles of linguistic reconstruction, tweaked and formed by a lot of other anecdotal evidence that has led to a pretty academically-sound (but not beyond complete questionability) understanding of what it actually looked like. Don't let the word 'hypothesised' make it seem as if it's a wishy-washy concept. We just have to call it that because it comes from linguistic reasoning rather than real evidence. 



> If “had impact” is the better descriptor than “came from”, the result is nonetheless dramatic in terms of structure as well as vocabulary. I have the idea that the influence of French on English, while extensive, is mainly at the high-blown end of the vocabulary — that when we’re in real trouble, we holler “help”, not “assistance”. (Of course, that’s someone else’s smart remark. I just don’t have an attribution.) I still have the idea that the influence of Nordic languages is more fundamental.


I'd say you're completely on the ball with that remark. 



> Thinking about your description of how “hesten” and “huset” developed leads me to wonder if the reason these forms did not contribute to the impact of Nordic languages on English, was because they were hard to hear and make sense of if you were listening in a language that already had separated definite articles preceding their nouns. The forms were a surprise to me precisely because I hadn’t really _heard them in all the listening that preceded my seeing them in writing._


It'd be great if we could know the answers as to _*why *_things happen in historical language development. All we know for certain is that observable changes take place, and we can theorise what the motivations were for such changes but sometimes things just happen and it seems pretty random. Definiteness marking is certainly a very salient feature and I don't think the impact was that great to warrant such a switch-over. The structural adaptions like in the pronominal system are a sign that these languages were deeply interconnected, and that has led some people to hypothesise that English _creolised _in this environment (many people don't think the interaction went that deep, though). While the case is stable that "Viking Scandinavian" _changed_ English as we know it today, and not that it _replaced_ it - there will always be elements that English didn't take from it - and this could just be one of them.


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## LilianaB

To answer your question, briefly, Srk: No, Danish does not really sound anything like English -- it may have certain features that make it sound similar to English, especially to a person not familiar with Scandinavian languages. It is a Germanic language, so there definitely are some similarities, but not that many. The answer to your second question would be: no, Danish is not an intermediate language between German and English. The rest was really thoroughly explained by all the contributors.   

Danish is also not an agglutinative language, only the definite forms of nouns are created this way. Germanic languages do not really come from German, but rather are related to German.


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## francisgranada

srk said:


> ... I don’t know whether you are saying Scandinavian languages are or are not agglutinative.  It sounds at first that you are saying they are not — that they are “syntactical” instead — but agglutination, where it occurs, is certainly part of syntax.
> 
> I don’t have any illusions about Danish being agglutinative to the extent that Hungarian is.  It was a beginning impression when I started to learn and was based on the earliest instruction in the text I was using.  It was not an impression that was supported as I read further.  It may have been pointless of me to talk about it in that way at all in this thread.  I could just as well have said that this feature of Danish was surprising to me and left it at that



The Scandinavian Germanic languages do not belong to the agglutinative languages, of course. Whether they are rather "synthetic" or not is an other crirerion, I think. E.g. the Spanish future "iré" is expressed in English _analytically _"I shall go", i.e. not by a verbal ending like in Spanish. Thus, the agglutinave languages can also be more or less or synthetic or analytic, even if they tend to be more synthetic comparing with the modern Indo-European languages. 

The definiteness expressed by an article attached to the end of the noun/adjevtive is neither a criterion from this point of view. See e.g. the Romanian and Bulgarian: they both are non-agglutanative languages, neverthless they use definite articles attached to the end. On the other hand, the Hungarian is an (almost) "pure" agglutinative language, and the definite article precedes the noun/adjective exactly like in English.


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## LilianaB

Scandinavian languages (except Icelandic) perhaps, are more analytic than synthetic. They are not agglutinative, but they form the definite form of nouns in an agglutinative way. In this respect Baltic or even Slavic languages may be more agglutinative, or rather use more agglutinative techniques. I don't consider Finnish a Scandinavian language in this respect -- this is the way I was taught, although I know now they sometimes call it also Scandinavian, but not Nordic. Finnish is a Finno-Ugric language and it is agglutinative. Even Icelandic may be more analytic than synthetic, I think, but less than the other Nordic languages.


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## NorwegianNYC

srk said:


> NorwegianNYC:
> 
> 
> It is difficult for me to follow a lot of what you say. (I’m not trying to be rude. I just need some clarification.) I don’t know whether you are saying Scandinavian languages are or are not agglutinative. It sounds at first that you are saying they are not — that they are “syntactical” instead — but agglutination, where it occurs, is certainly part of syntax.
> 
> 
> I don’t have any illusions about Danish being agglutinative to the extent that Hungarian is. It was a beginning impression when I started to learn and was based on the earliest instruction in the text I was using. It was not an impression that was supported as I read further. It may have been pointless of me to talk about it in that way at all in this thread. I could just as well have said that this feature of Danish was surprising to me and left it at that.
> 
> 
> I don’t understand what you’re saying about “sheep, salmon” and “deer”. These do not form their plural by adding “s”, but I don’t know what this has to do with noun gender. I see gender as a sorting mechanism for deciding how nouns and their modifiers are to be handled grammatically, most importantly with respect to case. Are you saying that, because “the plural” can be thought of as separate gender because of its distinctive handling with regard to case — that nouns not using final “s” in the plural should belong to still another gender? If you want to regard “salmon” and “horse” as having different grammatical gender because of how they form their plural, what about nouns that are uncountable like “jewelry”? You’d have to add many more genders to German if your criterion is the way in which plurals are formed.




I think this thread and you posts are great! Keep it up!


No, neither the Scandinavian languages nor any other Germanic language are agglutinative. They are however different shades of syntactic, with English in the lower (analytic) end of the spectrum and German more fusional/inflective.


There is of course an agglutinating tendency in Danish (as oppose to an isolating tendency), but only in terms of morphemes into single words, not into longer sentence-like constructs.


When I say that one may argue that words like “sheep”, “salmon”, “dear” etc. belong to a different gender than s-plural nouns in English, the rationale is that the term gender does not mean sex, it simply means category. In the romance languages, wherefrom Germanic has taken its M/F/N categorization, it tends to be a more regular correlation between physical gender and grammatical gender. Consider Spanish “el gato” and “la gata”, meaning male cat and female cat respectively.


In the Germanic languages, the gender assignments are much more arbitrary and originally not based on physical gender at all. Germanic nouns fall into categories based on criteria now lost, not physical demarcations of “what is male” and “what is female”. A good example is Danish. In that language, the former ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ genders merged. This would not have happened if there was a correlation between physical and grammatical gender – the way it is in e.g. Spanish and Italian.


Also, in many languages around the world, grammatical genders are based on very different criteria then sex. Words like “sheep”, “salmon”, “dear” etc. can therefore be said to constitute a separate noun category, not based on an affiliation with one of the traditional gender labels, but because they are the group that does not take an ending in plural. What really is a grammatical gender but a group of words with a different set of endings? Uncountable nouns like “jewelry” will not fall into this category. It is possible to construct the term “jewelries”, where as “sheeps” does not exist.

Finally - I am not advocating a paradigm shift here. Weather English is a gender-less language is - to me - a matter of definition.


----------



## Kevin Beach

I understand the logic of suggesting that nouns with unmodified plurals belong to a different gender, but I think it's stretching it. Were they in a gender of their own in OE or ME? If not, then why try to place them in a different gender in an era when grammatical gender has vanished in English?

Every word has its own etymology. Just because there is a handful of words (and that's all there is, really) that don't modify in the plural doesn't mean that they are _eiusdem generis_. Is there really any evidence that they are anything more than anomalies?

And if you want to put them in their own gender, will you make a third gender for the plurals formed by modifications other than -s : children, oxen?


----------



## NorwegianNYC

Hi Kevin,

Good question! I do not advocate the introduction of artificial grammatical categories, and no - they were not of the same grammatical gender in days of yore. However, consider this: In e.g. Semitic and Romance languages, there is a correlation between grammatical gender and physical gender, hence the M/F (and occasionally N) distinction. In the Germanic languages, there is little or no such correlation. It is actually pretty arbitrary! What is then really the difference between German having the grammatical genders M/F/N and English having (for the sake of the example) Category 1 (plural in -s), Category 2 (plural in -en) and Category 3 (no plural ending)?


----------



## francisgranada

I have the feeling that the original question is not about the genders ....


----------



## berndf

NorwegianNYC said:


> When I say that one may argue that words like “sheep”, “salmon”, “dear” etc. belong to a different gender than s-plural nouns in English, the rationale is that the term gender does not mean sex, it simply means category. In the romance languages, wherefrom Germanic has taken its M/F/N categorization, it tends to be a more regular correlation between physical gender and grammatical gender. Consider Spanish “el gato” and “la gata”, meaning male cat and female cat respectively.
> 
> 
> In the Germanic languages, the gender assignments are much more arbitrary and originally not based on physical gender at all. Germanic nouns fall into categories based on criteria now lost, not physical demarcations of “what is male” and “what is female”. A good example is Danish. In that language, the former ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’ genders merged. This would not have happened if there was a correlation between physical and grammatical gender – the way it is in e.g. Spanish and Italian.


Germanic and Italic languages share the same 3-gender system. There is absolutely no doubt. In some modern Germanic languages the morphological distinctions have decayed to a point where continued gender semantics has become meaningless (e.g. English and Danish but _not_, e.g., German and Icelandic). But that are developments in those modern language and has absolutely nothing to do with an alleged incompatibility in principle between the Germanic and Latin gender systems.





francisgranada said:


> I have the feeling that the original question is not about the genders ....


Absolutely, and we should leave it at that.


----------



## berndf

srk said:


> After all, I can’t see your example of adjective declension in German as a remnant of a more extensive system.  It seems to me to be rather an effort to touch up a deficient system — to identify noun gender where the indefinite article is of no help, rather than dropping an ending where none is needed.  In fact, this was the mnemonic given to me for coming to terms with descriptive adjectives when I was taught German.  If this misses the point, please say so.
> 
> I’ll take myšlenka’s word that this feature developed independently from that of definite noun endings.


I am afraid, this is not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact. The duality of weak and strong declension systems of adjectives is *common *German*ic* (not German) and predated the loss of gender marker in (strong) German nouns. You find it in all branches of Germanic, in Old High German, in Old English, in Old Norse and in Gothic.


----------



## JuanEscritor

Let's be clear on something: Present Day English has no grammatical gender.  There have already been threads on whether it does or should, and support has never been provided for either case.  The only place English makes any distinctions in noun categorization is in the pronoun system, and there it is based only on _semantic_ animacy and gender/sex of the referent, and only in the third person singular.

That's a handful of words; this can hardly be considered a system of any type.  And this is the difference: English 'gender' happens only on the word level; grammatical gender happens on the _phrase_ level: words are of one grammatical gender or another based on how they affect the words around them, not based on their own inherent properties.

JE


----------



## NorwegianNYC

francisgranada said:


> I have the feeling that the original question is not about the genders ....


 I agree - sorry....


----------



## berndf

srk said:


> *I can certainly cite *examples of phrases in Danish that sound amazingly like their equivalents in English, and very little like German.


It would be interesting, if you did. Then we can analyse those examples.


----------



## olaszinho

LilianaB said:


> Scandinavian languages (except Icelandic) perhaps, are more analytic than synthetic. Even Icelandic may be more analytic than synthetic, I think, but less than the other Nordic languages.



As far as I know, Icelandic is a highly inflected language. It retains three genders, has four cases (like in ancient Germanic) both adjectives and nouns are declined and verbs are conjugated, unlike the other Scandinavian languages, except Faroese to some extent. German also retains four cases but noun declension is essentially made by changing the articles.


----------



## LilianaB

Still nothing like Baltic or Slavic languages, or Georgian, perhaps.


----------



## NorwegianNYC

If you look at the true analytic languages, such as Vietnamese and Indonesian, I think you will find that the North-Germanic languages are all well entrenched in the synthetic group. Some of them, such as Icelandic, and to a lesser extent Scandinavian, have fusional/inflecting traits, and even English is best defined as a synthetic language.


----------



## srk

Berndf:

About citing examples where Danish sounds closer to English than German.



> It would be interesting, if you did. Then we can analyse those examples.



Kan vi gå nu?
Can we go now?
Können wir jetzt gehen?

Skal vi gå ud nu?
Shall we go out now?
Sollen wir jetzt ausgehen?

Vil De sige det igen?
Will you say it again?
Können Sie es wiederholen?

Hvor kommer De fra?
Where do you come from?
Woraus stammen Sie?

Hvad dato er det idag?
What date is it today?
Was ist Heute das Datum?

Vi alle så det allrede.
We all saw it already.
Wir alle haben es schon gesehen.


----------



## francisgranada

I'd like to say that we are now speaking about more critearia at once ... I think it's obvious that the inflecting and the agglutinative languages tend to be more synthetic than languages that _a priori _miss whatever case ending and verbal ending (conjugation). The possibilty of creating compound words that "replace whole sentences" is even another feature that has nothing to do with the agglutinative charecter of a language, as well as the grammatical gender "as is". It doesn't mean that there's no eventual correlation between these features, but this is another question to be discussed in an other thread (I think so).

As to the Danish, I personally have the impression that it's at least as "German-like" as "English-like" ... Of course, there are many common features, but this is not so surprising as all the Germanic languages come from the same presupposed Proto-Germanic, and, if we take in consideration the well-known historical Danish influence on English.


----------



## berndf

srk said:


> Kan vi gå nu?
> Can we go now?
> Können wir jetzt gehen?


Middle English: Connen we n(o)u gon?
Low German: Könnt wi nu gahn?



srk said:


> Skal vi gå ud nu?
> Shall we go out now?
> Sollen wir jetzt ausgehen?


Middle English: Shall we n(o)u outgon?
Low German: Schall we nu utgahn?



srk said:


> Vil De sige det igen?
> Will you say it again?
> Können Sie es wiederholen?


They are not the same sentences. _Können Sie es wiederholen?_ means _Can you repeat it?
_The cognates _igen - again - entgegen_ are quite interesting. _Again_ in the sense of _once more_ is first attested in late Middle English (Chaucer) when the Viking era was already but distant memory. The Old & Middle English meaning was _against_. The forms _again_ and _agains(t)_ (originally an adverbial genitive of _again_) semantically separated only in Early Modern English. The usual Middle English word for once _again_ was _eft_. As of the 13th century, the phrase _eft a__ȝen_ or _a__ȝen __eft _for_ once more_ is attested. The meaning _again=once more_ probably originated from this phrase. The alternative Middle English meaning was _back _(e.g. _bringen again = to bring back_). This is an interesting parallel to the German adverb and proposition _wi(e)der_ where the once spelling variant (_wider_) today exclusively means _against_ and the other (_wieder_) means _back_.

You should bear in mind that Modern German is not the native language of the area where the Angles and Saxons came from. The genetically closest languages are Frisian and Low German. Modern German originated from a mixture of High German dialects spoken several hundred km further South.

Also note that I concentrated on Middle English, not Old English. The avoids having to discuss any possible later Old Norse influence. It is actually the biggest methodological flaw of this strange newspaper article that they jumped straight from Old English to Late Modern English, as if Middle English had never existed. -- And of course, that they use only High German and not Low German as a comparison.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

srk said:


> Berndf:
> 
> About citing examples where Danish sounds closer to English than German.
> 
> 
> 
> Kan vi gå nu?
> Can we go now?
> Können wir jetzt gehen?
> 
> -> German also knows "nun" (nowadays perceptibly less used than "jetzt"), there's the pleonastic "jetzt und nun" where you can see its old meaning.
> I won't speak about German dialects because I don't speak any dialect, but I can tell you that their syntaxis may differ noticeably from standard German.
> 
> Skal vi gå ud nu?
> Shall we go out now?
> Sollen wir jetzt ausgehen?
> 
> I'm not very sure, but I think that English "shall" and German "sollen" aren't always used in the same contexts or with the same meaning.
> 
> Vil De sige det igen?
> Will you say it again?
> Können Sie es wiederholen?
> 
> "Können Sie/ Kannst Du das nochmal/ noch ein Mal sagen?" is another option. "Es" isn't a mistake, but "das" is more idiomatic.
> I find it strange that you use "will" in English when you could have used "can".
> When I want to add some local flavour (Low German) I sometimes say "dat", in Berlin you even may hear "det" .
> 
> Hvor kommer De fra?
> Where do you come from?
> Woraus stammen Sie?
> 
> "Woher kommen Sie/ Woher kommst Du?" is the correct German translation, in my area (North-Western Germany also possible "Wo kommen Sie her?"/ "Wo kommst Du her?".
> English also knows the verb "to stem from" and the pronoun "whence".
> 
> Hvad dato er det idag?
> What date is it today?
> Was ist Heute das Datum?
> 
> Was ist heute für ein Tag? (day of the week)
> Der wievielte ist heute? (date)
> 
> Vi alle så det allrede.
> We all saw it already.
> Wir alle haben es schon gesehen.



That's contemporary German where the semantic distinction between perfect and simple is virtually nonexistent.
Also possible (but the simple past in this sentence somewhat strange in modern German): "Wir alle sahen es schon/bereits".

If you read Chaucer you'll wonder how the similarities to German increase, i. e. the past participle with "y" in the beginning - corresponding to German "ge".


----------



## NorwegianNYC

Berndf:

I agree with your entry, but I believe the combination _eft agan_ (from ealier _eft ongean) _was common in the ME period, and that the hardening of the -g- is due to Norse influence. I also believe the gist of the article is that Norse interrupted the development this Insular Low German variant, and side-tracked it sufficiently to give it a distinct Scandinavian flavor. As a matter of fact, Vestfoldlilja (on the previous page) is slightly mistaken in that (qv.) "English derives directly from the Scandinavian languages and not their west-Germanic counterpart". Their point is that the development of OE as a pure West-Germanic was abruptly halted, and that the further development was a slight hybridization based on North-Germanic patterns instead. Yes, OE is the basis of Modern English, but ME is a development that would not have happened had the Norse impact not been as significant as it was. The article is slightly misconstrued (it is after all a newspaper article...). ME is not Norse with a West Germanic twist. It is a watered down OE with a strong Norse twist.


----------



## Dan2

srk said:


> I was already aware of the lack of verb conjugation  as a remarkable feature of Danish grammar. ... I’ve thought that this  feature of Danish is so startling that the explanation must be that at  some point it was legislated, as new orthographies are.


I think it happened naturally.



srk said:


> I can certainly cite examples of phrases in Danish  that sound amazingly  like their equivalents in English, and very little  like German.
> ...
> Kan vi gå nu?
> Can we go now?
> Können wir jetzt gehen?
> ...
> ...


If your point is that Danish (and Scandinavian in general) has some strong similarities to English, sufficient for there to exist corresponding sentences that sound very similar, you have made the point well.  But your inclusion of _dis_similar-sounding German translations strongly suggests that what you're _really _trying to demonstrate is that English is closer to Danish than it is to German.  But of course you haven't done that, because you've a) carefully selected sentences that are similar in Danish and English (rather than using a random sampling), and b) in some cases chosen a German translation that is dissimilar to the English and Danish while a more similar one exists (as others have pointed out).

To illustrate the point that one can skew the data to support whatever hypothesis one prefers, consider the following English-German-Norwegian triples (I use Norwegian because I've never studied Danish, but I believe the "conclusion" would be identical if the Norwegian words, where different, were replaced with their Danish equivalents):
make, machen, lage
not, nicht, ikke
auto, Auto, bil
sea, See, hav
flesh, Fleisch, kjøtt
do-, tu-, gjør-
speak-, sprech-, snakk-/tal-
old, alt, gammel
when, wenn/wann, når
And many more...

Finally, early on in this thread we refuted your original assumption that English and Danish "come from" German, so there's really no reason to talk about German at all.  If the question is whether English is more of a West-Germanic language (the traditional assumption) or more of a Scandinavian language (as you are suggesting), we should be comparing English to a major West-Germanic language that has not undergone some of the changes that German has, namely Dutch.  English is closer to Dutch than it is to German, so German is simply irrelevant to the discussion.



Alxmrphi said:


> I watch a lot of Danish TV and my dad does, too (absolutely zero experience with languages or linguistics) and sometimes when you get these typical short sentences, he always smiles and looks at me and mentions how it's really odd for him to go for 30 mins without understanding a word, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this thing is spoken that he can understand and it surprises him - he can notice a connection.


This observation fits well with my remarks above.  The fact that your father, who's never studied Scandinavian, recognizes an occasional phrase, shows that there are similarities between Danish and English; the fact that he has to sit thru 30 minutes of totally unintelligible dialog in order to encounter one of these phrases illustrates just how unusual a close phonetic correspondence between Danish and English sentences actually is!

Furthermore, and this is crucial for this thread, I believe that this experience, on the part of an English-only speaker, of "Hey I understood that!" is more common in the case of Dutch dialog than of Scandinavian.  To me, Dutch "sounds" more like English (even when not understood) than the Scandinavian languages do.  (I admit that this a purely subjective remark and include it only because, if corroborated by others, it may have some relevance to the discussion.)


----------



## killerbee256

I think the reason English is close to Scandinavian in some ways, is because of the dialect leveling that took place during the Dane law. From what I understand at the time there was still a moderate degree of mutual intelligibly between Old English Old Norse, close enough that some Old English loan words made back to Scandinavia. But I don’t believe we know the degree of leveling/mixing because at the time no one wrote the common speech, which would of course vary by region, only in the Old English or Old Norse standard.


----------



## berndf

killerbee256 said:


> I think the reason English is close to Scandinavian in some ways, is because of the dialect leveling that took place during the Dane law. From what I understand at the time there was still a moderate degree of mutual intelligibly between Old English Old Norse, close enough that some Old English loan words made back to Scandinavia. But I don’t believe we know the degree of leveling/mixing because at the time no one wrote the common speech, which would of course vary by region, only in the Old English or Old Norse standard.


Yes, substantial Old Norse influence on Old English during the Dane Law period is undisputed. Old English influence on Scandinavian languages is more difficult to establish. The strongest West Germanic influence on main land North Germanic (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) happened during the Hanseatic League period (13th to 16th centuries) when Middle Low German served as lingua franca of trade in the North and Baltic Sea areas. Estimates of the size of the Middle Low German substrate in Danish range between 20% and 30% (estimates of 50% or more you sometimes read are certainly exaggerated). German (Low and High) influence continued after the demise of the Middle Low German standard language in the 16th century for different reasons. One reason is the dominance of the Lutheran church in Scandinavia and another is that until 1864 when Schleswig-Holstein became Prussian, Denmark had a sizable in influential German (at the time already diglossic, High German in writing and Low German or Frisian in colloquial oral communication) minority. Even the city of Altona on the North bank of the Elbe river, mentioned by srk in the OP and now a part of Hamburg was Danish until 1864.


----------



## killerbee256

I can see how trying to untangle the origin of a loanword would prove difficult when the candidates are Old English, Frisian or Low German. Especially given a words could have come from one source and when been reinforced later by another. What about Frankish/Old Low Franconian, did it have any influence on Scandinavian languages?


----------



## berndf

Yes, I should have mentioned that too. There was certainly Old Low Franconian influence during the Viking era already. Heddeby, the most important trading post with the Frankish empire, situated at the Dennewerk, the then border between Denmark and the Frankish ruled Saxony and with its 5000 inhabitants one of the three or four biggest Viking "cities" was polyglot, Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old Frankish.

There was also Franconian influence through Middle Dutch at the same time when Middle Low German influence was at its peak.


----------



## LilianaB

NorwegianNYC said:


> If you look at the true analytic languages, such as Vietnamese and Indonesian, I think you will find that the North-Germanic languages are all well entrenched in the synthetic group. Some of them, such as Icelandic, and to a lesser extent Scandinavian, have fusional/inflecting traits, and even English is best defined as a synthetic language.



Of course none of the Indo-European languages is totally analytic, compared to Vietnamese or modern Mandarin. They are still on the analytic side, as compared to more synthetic languages such as Baltic and Slavic languages. 

I don't really think Modern English is defined as a synthetic language unless perhaps someone classified all Indo-European languages as synthetic and put them into one category, by just looking at the historical grammar.


----------



## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Of course none of the Indo-European languages is totally analytic, compared to Vietnamese or modern Mandarin. They are still on the analytic side, as compared to more synthetic languages such as Baltic and Slavic languages.
> 
> I don't really think Modern English is defined as a synthetic language unless perhaps someone classified all Indo-European languages as synthetic and put them into one category, by just looking at the historical grammar.


This question doesn't really matter for the current topic.


----------



## LilianaB

srk said:


> Berndf:
> 
> About citing examples where Danish sounds closer to English than German.
> 
> 
> 
> Kan vi gå nu?
> Can we go now?
> Können wir jetzt gehen?
> 
> Skal vi gå ud nu?
> Shall we go out now?
> Sollen wir jetzt ausgehen?



This may be just some slight similarity in the written form. Are you referring to speech or written language? Language is first of all speech -- this is how it came into being, so if you listen to all of those phrases, there is very little similarity between English and Danish or Danish and German, not to mention English and German. They use totally different sounds and intonation patterns.


----------



## NorwegianNYC

killerbee256 said:


> I think the reason English is close to Scandinavian in some ways, is because of the dialect leveling that took place during the Dane law. From what I understand at the time there was still a moderate degree of mutual intelligibly between Old English Old Norse, close enough that some Old English loan words made back to Scandinavia. But I don’t believe we know the degree of leveling/mixing because at the time no one wrote the common speech, which would of course vary by region, only in the Old English or Old Norse standard.


There is a famous passage in Sagas of the kings of Norway where the author 'laments' how "Viljam Bastard" corrupted the English tongue and made it impossible for people to understand each other. Although Snorri most certainly exaggerates the pre-Norman mutual intelligibility (he lived 150 years later), it seems reasonable that a hybrid of broken Norse and broken OE would have been the jargon of interaction. However, the impact OE had on Norse, is marginal at best, for two reasons: (1) It was very much a one way migration, and the Norsemen settled in England; and (2) given the impact Norse had on OE, it seems unlikely that OE influenced the occasional returning Norsemen a great deal.


On the other hand, the impact of Middle Low German on Scandinavian (especially the Danish and Norwegian variants) is hard to overlook. It has been estimated that 30-40% of the Danish/Norwegian vocabulary is German (mostly LG) and Dutch. This is an astonishing number, and by far ranks the number of Norman words in English. It is hard to estimate exactly how many words came in to the language(-s), and at what time (some may have arrived much later). However, the Scandinavian influence on LG/Dutch was marginal for the same reason as the Norse/OE interaction - it was a one way affair.


----------



## Alxmrphi

LilianaB said:
			
		

> - this is how it came into being, so if you listen to all of those phrases, there is very little similarity between English and Danish


I have to, respectfully, disagree.
Regarding those phrases, how would my father with no non-English knowledge be taken aback that it sounds so similar to English? That's evidence, right there, that in those kinds of short sentences with shared cognates, there is similarity. Obviously that's not saying overall - we're only talking about a tiny portion of lexical items in restricted contexts, but still, the case holds that there is similarity.


----------



## berndf

NorwegianNYC said:


> I agree with your entry, but I believe the combination _eft agan_ (from ealier _eft ongean) _was common in the ME period


Yes, that's what I said. I said that the meaning _again=once_ _more _is probably a shortening of this phrase.





NorwegianNYC said:


> ..., and that the hardening of the -g- is due to Norse influence.


Yes, spellings with <ga> (significant of course only after <ȝ> and <g> separated graphically) rather than <ȝe> or (later) <ye> where originally Northern dialectal which entered the Southern standard only in the 15th century. This is a clear sign of Norse influence.


NorwegianNYC said:


> Yes, OE is the basis of Modern English, but ME is a development that would not have happened had the Norse impact not been as significant as it was. The article is slightly misconstrued (it is after all a newspaper article...). ME is not Norse with a West Germanic twist. It is a watered down OE with a strong Norse twist.


That is a strange way of looking at it as most of the known OE corpus already incorporated Old Norse influence (9th - 11th century). At the time of the transition of Old to Middle English in the 12th century, it had already all happened. Influence on English at that time was from the continent, mainly from French. The fact the the most characteristic phonological shift, the loss of full vowels in final unstressed syllables, happened synchronously in English, Dutch, Low and High German (11th-12th centuries) is also noteworthy.

PS: There might be a misconception in some people's minds of continued strong Old Norse influence on Middle English because the London dialect came increasingly under the influence of Northern dialects, mainly through internal migration. And Northern dialect, naturally, experienced stronger Old Norse influence than Southern and East Midlands-dialects. What appears like Scandinavian influence on Middle-English was in effect purely internal migrations and shifts in influence of dialects within England. Direct link with Scandinavia ended with conquest of York, the political and cultural capital of the Danelaw in the campaign of 1069.


----------



## NorwegianNYC

berndf said:


> That is a strange way of looking at it as most of the known OE corpus already incorporated Old Norse influence (8th - 11th century). At the time of the transition of Old to Middle English in the 12th century, it had already all happened. Influence on English at that time was from the continent, mainly from French. The fact the the most characteristic phonological shift, the loss of full vowels in final unstressed syllables, happened synchronously in English, Dutch, Low and High German (11th-12th centuries) is also noteworthy.



Hi Berndf,

To clarify: In this post I am referring to the article Vestfoldlilja mentioned. The authors (of the research paper, not the newspaper article) are not advocating that English is a North Germanic language _per se_, but that due to the heavy Norse influence, English rather developed along the lines of North Germanic than West Germanic in the transition from OE to ME. It is also mentioned that English is not pronounced akin to Scandinavian (which I personally consider a dialect continuum rather than separate languages), which again goes to your point that Norse did little to impact the phonological shift. The study aims to prove that Modern English is more akin to Scandinavian than its fellow West-Germanic tongues because of the impact of Norse in the transitional phase between OE and ME.


----------



## berndf

NorwegianNYC said:


> To clarify: In this post I am referring to the article Vestfoldlilja mentioned. The authors (of the research paper, not the newspaper article) are not advocating that English is a North Germanic language _per se_,... but that due to the heavy Norse influence, English rather developed along the lines of North Germanic than West Germanic in the transition from OE to ME.


Ok, I see. The newspaper article claimed that "Old English died out" (in boldface). That is a much stronger statement.


NorwegianNYC said:


> ...but that due to the heavy Norse influence, English rather developed along the lines of North Germanic than West Germanic in the transition from OE to ME.


Still sounds strange because many of the syntactic changes were due to loss of case-inflections and happened in the later part of the ME period and not during the OE-ME transition. I rather see parallel development for similar reasons rather than change caused by influence, though I admit to that, to some extend, increased influence of Northern dialects indirectly means increased Norse influence.



NorwegianNYC said:


> ...because of the impact of Norse in the transitional phase between OE and ME.


That is a highly non-standard use of the terms OE and ME as the Norse influence differentiates early and late OE and Northern and West-Midlands from Southern and East-Midlands dialects *of* (late) OE. The transition phase from OE to ME started after (direct) Norse influence had ended.


----------



## srk

Dan2 and LilianaB:

Dan2:

My point was to respond to berndf’s request for samples to justify my claim that “I can certainly cite examples of phrases in Danish that _sound_ amazingly like their equivalents in English, and very little like German”.

LilianaB:

Notice that I said “sound” not “read”.  If you will look at my first post — the one that started this thread — you will see that I was talking about _conversation_ heard aboard a train, not notes being passed back and forth.  As you say, language is first of all speech.   _Everyone_ that I have asked to judge the sound of those phrases has agreed that they sound very much like English.  I met a Dane in Copenhagen, married her in the US, and have visited family in Denmark.  I’ll accept their judgment that I do a good job of rendering these phrases aloud.

My contention that Danish sounds like English is not based on these few examples.  What made me think I was listening to English on that train was not that I _understood_ the words or phrases.  It was the rhythm, intonation, and the net effect of words that I could and _could not_ understand.  The net impression was, “That’s English.  Now, why can’t I understand what they’re saying?”

Please see vestfoldlilja’s post (#12) and the article she provides a link to.  I’m told that the scholarship behind the article is bad, but many more people than Alxmrphi, his father, and I think that Danish and English sound alike.

It’s beside the point, but “This may be just _some slight _similarity in the written form”, is a remarkable denial of what I see as a striking correspondence.

Dan2:

In terms of sound, I have kind of the opposite problem with you.  I worked for four years with an Amsterdam native, and we were good friends.  Armed with what I knew of English, German, and Danish, I could not make out a word of what he’d say sitting at a neighboring desk, talking to his wife on the phone.  I’ll accept that as a personal failing, but that leaves me at a loss to explain why I depended on my German rather than English to make out street signs in Brussels.

I know I’ve “carefully selected sentences that are similar in Danish and English.”  Thanks for the complement.  That’s what I said I could do and what berndf asked me to do.  I also accept your criticism that “in some cases [I’ve] chosen a German translation that is dissimilar to English and Danish…”  Here’s why:

“Vil De sige det igen?“ and “Will you say that again?” are acceptable ways to ask for a phrase to be repeated.  I’d probably choose “would” rather than “will”, but I wouldn’t correct myself for “will”.  It’s probably an example of one of the last places in AE where “will” is appropriately differentiated from “shall” in recognition of the fact that repeating the phrase will be a voluntary act.  I’m guessing that berndf would rather I had chosen “Werden Sie das wieder sagen?”, as it’s a closer literal translation.  I think that would be the right question if I were asking if the same phrase would be used in tomorrow’s speech as today’s.  “Können sie es wiederholen?” wasn’t great, but it is in the spirit of the questions in Danish and English.  In any case, what do you think of “Werden Sie das wieder sagen?” as a phrase which sounds like the other two?  Or, compare “Können Sie das nochmal sagen?” for similarity in sound if you’d rather.

I’ve never heard “Was ist heute das Datum?”  I chose it because I think it does the job, and because it is as close as I could come to the set of sounds I wrote in English and Danish.  Choose “Der wievielte ist heute?” if you think along with Angelo di fuoco that it is better, but be sure to compare the sound to the English and Danish equivalents.

“Hvor kommer De fra?” means “Where are you from?”, not where were you before you entered the room.  I believe “Woraus stammen Sie?” means the same thing, but if you like “Woher kommen Sie”, feel free.  I still don’t think it looks as much like the Danish question as the English one does.

Besides arguing that the choices in German should have been better, you said that it hardly mattered because there is really no reason to talk about German.  I thought I had conceded that a couple of pages ago.  Berndf came along, either didn’t notice or care, and asked for examples.

Speaking of which, I’d be glad to see a set of phrases, carefully chosen from Dutch, which are as close as my Danish examples are to English.  (With all due respect & smiley face.)

Alxmrphi:

Thanks very much for your help and moral support.

Everyone:

I already knew I was on the wrong track regarding how these languages developed before most of you contributed.  Some of what you’ve said has soaked in, and more will with time.  Thank you.


----------



## myšlenka

LilianaB said:


> This may be just some slight similarity in the written form. Are you referring to speech or written language? Language is first of all speech -- this is how it came into being, so if you listen to all of those phrases, there is very little similarity between English and Danish or Danish and German, not to mention English and German. They use totally different sounds and intonation patterns.


LilianaB,
English, German and Danish do of course use different sounds and intonation patterns but I disagree with you when you say that there is very little similarity between the languages. Even though I don't understand much spoken Dutch, German or Icelandic, I still have a feeling that I should understand because they sound familiar. It's like srk describes: _this sounds like something I understand, but why don't I?_ I don't remember what it was like not to understand English but I am sure I would have the same kind of feeling with that language too. You might object that I know that all these languages are Germanic and that that knowlegde makes me create similarities which aren't there, but I think people without this knowledge would arrive at the same conclusions.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

Dan2 said:


> To illustrate the point that one can skew the data to support whatever hypothesis one prefers, consider the following English-German-Norwegian triples (I use Norwegian because I've never studied Danish, but I believe the "conclusion" would be identical if the Norwegian words, where different, were replaced with their Danish equivalents):
> make, machen, lage
> not, nicht, ikke
> auto, Auto, bil
> sea, See, hav
> flesh, Fleisch, kjøtt
> do-, tu-, gjør-
> speak-, sprech-, snakk-/tal-
> old, alt, gammel
> when, wenn/wann, når
> And many more...



snakk- has a cognate in Low German "snacken" (in North-Western Germany you may hear "schnacken"). Tal- has cognates in "tell" and "zählen" (in modern German: "to count"). "Gammel" has a cognate in German "gammelig" or "vergammelt" (rotten, stale).


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

srk said:


> “Hvor kommer De fra?” means “Where are you from?”, not where were you before you entered the room.  I believe “Woraus stammen Sie?” means the same thing, but if you like “Woher kommen Sie”, feel free.  I still don’t think it looks as much like the Danish question as the English one does.



Sorry if I have to be more explicit, but the sentence "Woraus stammen Sie" is bad German and grammatically incorrect, you cannot use "woraus" in this sentence - "woher", if at all. Woraus? Aus dem Loch, aus dem Scharnk, aus dem Wäschekorb, aus der Patsche.
Furthermore, a native speaker of German wouldn't use the verb "stammen" in such a question, it's way too formal. It would be either "Woher kommen Sie" (respectful distance) or "Woher kommst Du?" (a more intimate way) - possibly with an addition like "gebürtig" ("where were you born") or "gerade" ("right now").


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## killerbee256

Angelo di fuoco said:


> "Woher kommst Du?" (a more intimate way)


That reminds me of early modern English, it sounds like "Where comist thu?," but without having exposure to Shakespeare, or the King James Bible I don't think most people would make the connection. I can guess the meaning of "Woher kommen Sie" based on my Romance language knowledge ... but only because I know the context.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Bur even so: phraseology is a delicate matter, choosing carefully constructed sentences is just the wrong way to do it because even closely related languages develop different expressions for similar situations, a word may be frequently used in one language, obsolete in another or simply not idiomatic, having developed slightly different shades of meaning. This is most true especially for colloquial expressions.


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## merquiades

Hello.  I'm not at all an expert on Danish but by looking and listening to pages in this phrasebook it would appear that written and spoken Danish are vastly different.   For example:  Jeg (I) is pronounced "JaI".  "v" and "h" as well as final consonants seem silent and "g" can be pronounced many different ways.  Very long words seem to me to collapse into one syllable.  So, I deduce that the discussion shouldn't be totally based on written speech.  A good question is how Danish was spoken at the time it could have influenced English?  Besides that, both German and especially Dutch look closer to English.  Check out the link and compare yourselves.


----------



## LilianaB

myšlenka said:


> LilianaB,
> English, German and Danish do of course use different sounds and intonation patterns but I disagree with you when you say that there is very little similarity between the languages. Even though I don't understand much spoken Dutch, German or Icelandic, I still have a feeling that I should understand because they sound familiar. It's like srk describes: _this sounds like something I understand, but why don't I?_ I don't remember what it was like not to understand English but I am sure I would have the same kind of feeling with that language too. You might object that I know that all these languages are Germanic and that that knowlegde makes me create similarities which aren't there, but I think people without this knowledge would arrive at the same conclusions.



Hi, Myslenka and Srk It depends what one understands _by sounds like_. If you view Danish and English from he same point of view as that all Slavic languages sound almost the same to some people, then, yes, they may sound similar to some people, since they are both Germanic languages. On a more detailed level, they do not really sound very similar. It all depends how precise the phonetic description sought after should be.         

It is obvious, that all Germanic languages have many similarities  -- this is why they belong to the same group -- because they historically stem from a Proto-Germanic language (a postulated language that might have existed). On the surface, the 21st century Germanic languages don't sound that similar to one another.


----------



## myšlenka

LilianaB said:


> Hi, Myslenka and Srk It depends what one understands _by sounds like_. If you view Danish and English from he same point of view as that all Slavic languages sound almost the same to some people, then, yes, they may sound similar to some people, since they are both Germanic languages. On a more detailed level, they do not really sound very similar. It all depends how precise the phonetic description sought after should be.
> 
> It is obvious, that all Germanic languages have many similarities  -- this is why they belong to the same group -- because they historically stem from a Proto-Germanic language (a postulated language that might have existed). On the surface, the 21st century Germanic languages don't sound that similar to one another.


LilianaB,
 the phonetic description is not that interesting. A very detailed phonetic descripion would show many differences between a man and a woman speaking the same language. What makes by brain think I am hearing Norwegian which in reality is Dutch, has probably got to do with phonotactics, intonation, syllable structure and stress assignment, i.e. general phonology.


----------



## LilianaB

Phonetic description includes all and everything -- how the language is actually realized. If English and Danish sound similar to you, it is Ok, I just don't think there too much of phonological material to support it.


----------



## myšlenka

LilianaB said:


> Phonetic description includes all and everything -- how the language is actually realized. If English and Danish sound similar to you, it is Ok, I just don't think there too much of phonological material to support it.


 No, I don't think Danish and English sound similar because I understand both. However, when I hear a Germanic language that I don't understand (especially in cases where it's part of the background noise and I'm not actively listening), I get the feeling that I should understand. It's when I start listening actively I realize that I don't. It's not a question about whether you think there is enough phonological material to support it academically, it's about the conclusion my brain (and probably many others) draw when exposed to this kind of stimuli.


----------



## LilianaB

Yes, you are right. When I hear a Baltic (not that there are that many of them), Slavic or a Germanic language I usually know which group they belong to, the problem is that I usually know right away which particular language it is, which may make the similarities to other languages less obvious. So, I would never be able to tell how people who don't really know those languages, even to a certain extent, experience them -- like someone who speaks only English, for example.


----------



## berndf

srk said:


> Besides arguing that the choices in German should have been better, you said that it hardly mattered because there is really no reason to talk about German.  I thought I had conceded that a couple of pages ago.  Berndf came along, either didn’t notice or care, and asked for examples.


That is exactly why I asked. I wanted to demonstrate that the relevant comparison is Middle English and Low German and not Modern High German.

Post-positioned prepositions are a clear sign of Norse influence on English and no-body denies that such influence exists and is significant. But many of the other syntactic changes (and I hope we agree by now that we are mostly conserved with syntax as vocabulary and phonology is too strongly influenced by more recent developments) in English happened at a time where Norse influence cannot plausibly be cited as the driving factor.


----------



## Alxmrphi

berndf said:
			
		

> Post-positioned prepositions are a clear sign of Norse influence on English


Can you give me an example to demonstrate what you mean? I'm having a bit of difficulty understanding what it is you're referring to exactly. Thanks.


----------



## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Can you give me an example to demonstrate what you mean? I'm having a bit of difficulty understanding what it is you're referring to exactly. Thanks.


_Where do you come from?_ rather than _From where do you come_?


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## Alxmrphi

berndf said:


> _Where do you come from?_ rather than _From where do you come_?


Ah, I know this as preposition-stranding. All clear now.


----------



## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Ah, I know this as preposition-stranding. All clear now.


Sorry for having used idiosyncratic terminology.


----------



## NorwegianNYC

berndf said:


> [...] many of the other syntactic changes [...] in English happened at a time where Norse influence cannot plausibly be cited as the driving factor.


 However - as you elegantly stated previously in this thread - the Norse impact was huge, but not uniform. Kentish and the dialects of Wessex experienced little impact, whereas Northumbrian and Mercian saw a great deal of change. At the same time, the written "standard" (in the sense there was one) was West Saxon - which was also the more conservative variant. Due to internal migration, the real Norse impact in the south might not have occurred until a century or two after the actual contact, and that puts us in the 1100-1150 nascence of ME.

I agree that the Norse invaders came too early for the major shift, but Norse might have been an indirect and latent impact.


----------



## Alxmrphi

<...>


> Due to internal migration, the real Norse impact in the south might not have occurred until a century or two after the actual contact, and that puts us in the 1100-1150 nascence of ME.


I think you're still being quite conservative with one to two centuries. This is an important point which leads different camps of belief to constantly bicker in academia about the nature of change, with one camp understanding the idea that change takes time to spread and the other that would expect a change to become universal and enter into print instantly. For instance replacement of *-th* in the third person singular by* -s* was still only _stylistically marked _by the time of Shakespeare (1564-1616) showing that the change was still ongoing in influential England and hadn't completed, with an often-cited source in Viking Scandinavian, would indicate just how slowly you can start to see changes in commonplace where a hypothesised starting point can be many centuries earlier (presuming you subscribe to that belief of that source of change).


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## berndf

NorwegianNYC said:


> and that puts us in the 1100-1150 nascence of ME.


Yes, that is what I said when the transition period from OE to ME was (more precisely: in #48 I spoke of the (entire) 12th century).


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## NorwegianNYC

Alxmrphi said:


> <...>
> 
> I think you're still being quite conservative with one to two centuries. This is an important point which leads different camps of belief to constantly bicker in academia about the nature of change, with one camp understanding the idea that change takes time to spread and the other that would expect a change to become universal and enter into print instantly. For instance replacement of *-th* in the third person singular by* -s* was still only _stylistically marked _by the time of Shakespeare (1564-1616) showing that the change was still ongoing in influential England and hadn't completed, with an often-cited source in Viking Scandinavian, would indicate just how slowly you can start to see changes in commonplace where a hypothesised starting point can be many centuries earlier (presuming you subscribe to that belief of that source of change).



A related and later development was the split of Old Norse into East Norse and West Norse, and then into Middle Norwegian, Middle Swedish and Middle Danish. We suspect this had already been going on for some time, but the main triggering event was the Plague around 1350, which almost eradicated the literate clergy, and with them the old High Norse spelling and orthography. When laypeople started writing after the Plague, one cannot help notice the advanced pidginization of the language. The case system had disappeared, so had conjugations and personal inflection, and we see the tell-tale sign of language change through radically increased use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. The Hanseatic (Low German) impact must have been immense, but as long as the clergy and saga writers were trained in and used "classical Norse", we have no idea what the spoken language was like.


----------



## Alxmrphi

NorwegianNYC said:


> A related and later development was the split of Old Norse into East Norse and West Norse, and then into Middle Norwegian, Middle Swedish and Middle Danish. We suspect this had already been going on for some time, but the main triggering event was the Plague around 1350, which almost eradicated the literate clergy, and with them the old High Norse spelling and orthography. When laypeople started writing after the Plague, one cannot help notice the advanced pidginization of the language. The case system had disappeared, so had conjugations and personal inflection, and we see the tell-tale sign of language change through radically increased use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. The Hanseatic (Low German) impact must have been immense, but as long as the clergy and saga writers were trained in and used "classical Norse", we have no idea what the spoken language was like.


Exactly. The same thing happened in England after the Norman Conquest. English wasn't written (excluding tiny vestiges like the Peterborough Chronicle) for a few hundred years and scribes who had been instructed with the skills and had the education to keep alive what are likely to have been archaic practices had all stopped while French reigned high and true. Then, when English comes back, all these changes are seen and many people point out that rather than it being the case that some massive, massive changes happened during this period (which no doubt to some extent they did), what we see as a change in writing could easily have been the start of a new tradition where old practices are lost and writing is sort of _reset _and moulded closer to the spoken form of the time. I think a lot of the changes we first see in print after English was written again must have been present in at least some areas and to some extent already before the Conquest but the chances of them being admitted to the written record were absolutely minimal given where writing took place and the teaching of the practice to those scribes who carried it out.


----------



## bicontinental

This is a very interesting thread, to which I really don’t have much to add, although I want to say that I agree with srk’s observations, or at least with most of them (smile). I’ll carefully tiptoe around the question of who was influenced by whom, and just say that I also find that English and Danish share many features not just in terms of vocabulary but also in language structure, syntax and grammar. I do think that the languages differ somewhat in sound patterns though, as both the pronunciation of individual words and the intonation of Danish are heavily influenced by the “stød” or glottal stop... at least in the standard form of Danish (rigsdansk). In several Danish dialects the “stød” is weaker, and the ‘v’ is pronounced more like the English ‘w’ giving the language a phonetic resemblance to English, but to my ear they’re still different. 

  Regarding the examples listed in post # 33, I just want to comment that the word order in the last example, “_Vi alle så det all*e*rede_” would be somewhat unusual in contemporary Danish (in contrast to the other examples which are all perfectly natural and idiomatic). ’Vi’ and ’alle’ are usually separated in main clauses, e.g. _vi så det alle(sammen)...(_with rare and quickly vanishing dialectal exceptions). In this stand-alone sentence ‘allerede’ would also be moved forward, and the present or past perfect would be more natural tense choices than the simple past: _Vi har (or havde) allerede set det allesammen_.
  Best,
  Bic.


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Exactly. The same thing happened in England after the Norman Conquest. English wasn't written (excluding tiny vestiges like the Peterborough Chronicle) for a few hundred years and scribes who had been instructed with the skills and had the education to keep alive what are likely to have been archaic practices had all stopped while French reigned high and true. Then, when English comes back, all these changes are seen and many people point out that rather than it being the case that some massive, massive changes happened during this period (which no doubt to some extent they did), what we see as a change in writing could easily have been the start of a new tradition where old practices are lost and writing is sort of _reset _and moulded closer to the spoken form of the time. I think a lot of the changes we first see in print after English was written again must have been present in at least some areas and to some extent already before the Conquest but the chances of them being admitted to the written record were absolutely minimal given where writing took place and the teaching of the practice to those scribes who carried it out.


If this analysis were true then we should see a larger variability in late than in early middle English. But this can not generally be observed. It seems rather that every scribe wrote as he heard it, much like we use sometimes pseudo-phonetic transcriptions for dialectal speech today. Standardization of English spelling started only when English regained the status of prestige, literary and official language (late 14th/15th century).


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## Gavril

berndf said:


> _Where do you come from?_ rather than _From where do you come_?



Is it clear that preposition-stranding is a North Germanic phenomenon? I thought that German did this as well, to some extent: e.g.,_ Schau mich an!_ "Look at me!", literally "Look me at". (Perhaps similar examples can be found in Dutch, etc.)


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## berndf

Gavril said:


> Is it clear that preposition-stranding is a North Germanic phenomenon? I thought that German did this as well, to some extent: e.g.,_ Schau mich an!_ "Look at me!", literally "Look me at". (Perhaps similar examples can be found in Dutch, etc.)


Yes, but this is a different logic. Where-ever you have final prepositions, the construction doesn't work in English and vice versa. The German logic would be, if you said _*I looked my glasses for_ rather than _I looked for my glasses_. In finite forms of phrasal verbs, the adverb or preposition is placed at the end so that verb stem and adverb/preposition form a bracket around the object. There is one form in Low German that somehow resembles preposition stranding though I am not sure it is the same thing: The adverb _dar_ (cognate with _there_) can be combined with preposition with the meaning _xxx that_ (_for that, to that, ..._), e.g._ Dafür kann ich nicht_s, literally _therefore can I nothing_ meaning _this is not my fault_. In Low German you say _då kann ick nix för_.


----------



## Alxmrphi

berndf said:


> If this analysis were true then we should see a larger variability in late than in early middle English.


How much larger? Where would there be a stipulation that variability had to be greater than what is observed? There was huge variation seen at the extremes of the dialect continuum in the Middle English period.


berndf said:


> It seems rather that every scribe wrote as he heard it,


Pre- or post-Conquest?


berndf said:


> Standardization of English spelling started only when English regained the status of prestige, literary and official language (late 14th/15th century).


I'm not sure where standardisation of spelling fits into this argument. 

Your post seems to me to be a cop-out dismissal without really presenting a good argument against it. Without knowing anything about how English sounded, and ignoring (if it is OE you're referring to) that the scriptoria were clearly based in the dominant West Saxon area, that our written evidence for this is reflective of how average people spoke, not even taking into account the fact that typical speech by average folk had just as much chance of being written down as I have at winning the lottery. Considering the massive jump that happened in those 150 years, does it seem reasonable for the jump to be that extreme? Lose pretty much all case-marking? A lot of people don't think so.

As John McWhorter puts it: "Middle English is what had been gradually happening to _spoken_ Old English in the centuries before it showed up in the written record."

It's something I am pretty convinced of and if you would like to put across implications that it's a load of nonsense then I'm afraid I'm forced to ask you ( in the friendliest way possible) to give a much better argument than variability should be larger in Late Middle English (which I don't get the logic of anyway).

That is a far less inconceivable view in my opinion than - in the space of 150 years when writing comes back, across the board and with reduced contact with other regions under Norman rule and no available written material, that such broad changes suddenly come to light. Slow shifts of people and language originating in Old English and purely existent at the spoken level, continuing through this dark patch and coming out again when English starts to be written again makes a lot more sense.

Quote:


> The misspellings that began to turn up in manuscripts show that unstressed vowel sounds merged in late Old English. Scribes sat at their desks all day long, tracing out letter shapes on parchment. About the year 1000, scribes had a great deal of trouble in remembering how the endings of words ought to be spelled. They hesitated about writing _stanas_ or _stanes_ (stones), _comon _or _coman_ (they came). Their indecision shows that the scribes had ceased to pronounce the vowels of those endings differently from one another.



Why isn't it wise to say that the writing of scribes was not reflective of typical spoken Old English and the full extent of the change we see in the return of English as Middle English  after the Conquest is because writing is then based on the spoken variety? We can already see some indications of change relating to the case system before the Conquest which might only be a tiny glimpse of the potentially stark differences. If scribes are struggling to remember the correct endings then I imagine the rural folk had completely wiped away such distinctions much earlier and that theory is so congruent with what modern linguists would say is extremely typical of a language-change situation. I just don't see the faults with this argument.

Counter-argument?


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> Yes, but this is a different logic. Where-ever you have final prepositions, the construction doesn't work in English and vice versa. The German logic would be, if you said _*I looked my glasses for_ rather than _I looked for my glasses_. In finite forms of phrasal verbs, the adverb or preposition is placed at the end so that verb stem and adverb/preposition form a bracket around the object. There is one form in Low German that somehow resembles preposition stranding though I am not sure it is the same thing: The adverb _dar_ (cognate with _there_) can be combined with preposition with the meaning _xxx that_ (_for that, to that, ..._), e.g._ Dafür kann ich nicht_s, literally _therefore can I nothing_ meaning _this is not my fault_. In Low German you say _då kann ick nix för_.



This Low German syntax has stuck in my local variant of German: "Da kann ich nichts für" (or nix instead of nichts) is perfectly normal in colloquial speach in Lower Saxony.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

berndf said:


> _Where do you come from?_ rather than _From where do you come_?



What about the somewhat unusual form "Whence do you come (from)"?


----------



## NorwegianNYC

I wanted to elaborate on what Ben Jamin wrote above:

make, machen, lage, but 'make' exists in dialects and older texts [also: Da. mage, Sw/No. make = partner/match is the from the same PIE root as both match and make (*mag = to fit)]

not, nicht, ikke [_not_ is from OE _ne wiht_, ne = (negation) and wiht = being, thing. 'Ne' is of course the cognate of (Eng.) no, (Ger.) nein, (Da/Sw.) nej

auto, Auto, bil both auto and bil come from automobil, so this example does not prove anything

sea, See, hav/sjø [as a matter of fact, sea/See/sø(da.)/sjø(sw/no) are the true cognates. (Da/Sw/No) _hav _is a cognate to Ger. _Haff_, wich again might be the source of _haven/Hafen/havn_]

flesh, Fleisch, kjøtt, but flesk means today the same as bacon [Da. kød/Sw. kött/No kjøtt derives from the words for 'cut', and "a cut of meat" is still a common expression in English. Da. _flæsk_/Sw. _fläsk_/ No. _flesk_ is still synonymous with 'meat' in the Scandinavian languages, but has drifted semantically more towards 'pork' or 'bacon']

speak-, sprech-, snakk-/tal-, but språk means speech [or technically 'language', but speak/speech/Sprache/sprog(da.)/språk(Sw/No) are the true cognates here. Also, (Da/No) 'snakke' is related to Eng _snicker_ and _snack; _the latter through M.Dutch _snacken_ = to chatter]

old, alt, gammel, but old- exists in compound words (oldefar, oldebarn)[and more than that: (da/no) _alder_ = age, and elde/eld- = ancient]


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## berndf

Alxmrphi said:


> Pre- or post-Conquest?


Post. We are talking of Middle English here. Written Middle English started ~ 2nd half of the 12th century.





Alxmrphi said:


> Why isn't it wise to say that the writing of scribes was not reflective of typical spoken Old English and the full extent of the change we see in the return of English as Middle English  after the Conquest is because writing is then based on the spoken variety?


Somehow we must be talking cross-purposes here. That's exactly what I always claimed: _Middle English after the Conquest is ... based on the spoken variety_.


----------



## Dan2

Dan2 said:


> *To illustrate the point that one can skew the dat*a (emphasis added 17 Dec)  to support whatever hypothesis one prefers, consider the following  English-German-Norwegian triples (I use Norwegian because I've never  studied Danish, but I believe the "conclusion" (*note quotes!*) would be identical if the  Norwegian words, where different, were replaced with their Danish  equivalents):
> 
> make, machen, lage
> ...





Angelo di fuoco said:


> snakk- has a cognate in Low German  "snacken"
> ...





			
				Ben Jamin said:
			
		

> make, machen, lage, but '*make*' exists in dialects and older texts
> ...





NorwegianNYC said:


> I wanted to elaborate on what Ben Jamin wrote above:


Thanks Angelo, Ben Jamin, NNYC for the additional interesting data (much but not all of which I was aware of).  But if you look at my original post, the logic is quite clear: I first pointed out that the OP had carefully selected his data to make it appear that English and Danish were extremely close and English and German very distant, while in fact a larger, more typical, array of data would not support that conclusion.  To demonstrate that data can be manipulated to make any point one wishes to make, I carefully chose words that would suggest that it's English and German that are very close, with Scandinavian the outlier.  But the purpose of my list should have been perfectly obvious from my "to demonstrate that one can skew the data"; clearly I was not taking any personal position on the relative closeness of the three languages.  In particular, the comment,
"auto, Auto, bil both auto and bil come from automobil, *so this example does not prove anything*"
is quite irrelevant since I was clearly not trying to prove anything (other than that facts can be misrepresented).


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## Theropod

English and Danish have a really similar sentence structure. They are also both analytic and have little inflection.


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