Latin.
When the Vikings came, one of their first tasks was to communicate with the Anglo-Saxons. This was not as tough a proposition for them as the one they would have faced had they invaded Greece. It is assumed that speakers of Old English and speakers of Old Norse could probably wangle a conversation. To ask “Do you have a horse to sell?” an Old English speaker would say “Haefst þu hors to sellenne?,” which would have made some kind of sense to an Old Norse speaker since in his language it went Hefir þu hross at selja ?
Understanding was one thing, but reproducing what he heard was another. For the Old Norse speaker, Old English was familiar but different, kind of like driving on the wrong (I mean, left!) side of the road in England feels to an American at first. Old English had endings in the same places and used in the same ways—but different endings. Take the word for “to deem, to judge”:
This was a basically bookless realm, recall, and so a Norseman did not see tables of endings laid out neatly on a page like this, nor did anyone teach him the language formally at all (short of perhaps being told occasional words , but that doesn’t allow you to express yourself). It was an oral world—people just talked; they didn’t write or read. The Norseman just heard these endings being used on the fly. It must have been confusing, and as such, tempting to just leave the endings off when speaking English, since he could be understood without them most of the time. This was the recipe for what eventually became Modern English, where the only remnant of the present-tense conjugations above is the third person singular - s , a little smudge left over from ye olde - th .
Yet, as always, the ancient world left us no actual descriptions of Vikings making their way in English and how well they did at it. We can infer a little from things like an eleventh-century inscription on a sundial, written in Old English by someone with a Scandinavian name, “Orm Gamalson”:
Orm Gamalsuna bohte Sanctus Gregorius minster tobrocan & tofalan & he hit let macan newan from grunde . . .
“Orm Gamalson bought St. Gregory’s minster broken and fallen down and had it made anew from the ground . . .”
Thus a Scandinavian was writing in English: that’s one glimpse at one Viking who wrapped his head around the language. But we’ll never know anything about Orm, including how he learned English, much less how he actually rendered it in his everyday speech. And that historiographical lacuna has allowed some linguists to propose that the Orm Gamalsons had nothing to do with English taking it all off.
They point out that Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have lost almost as many endings as English has, and Dutch and Frisian are not too far behind them. In the present, for example, Swedish and friends even surpass English; here is how to conjugate “to call” in Swedish—i.e., you don’t!
But this observation misses the forest for the trees. While other Germanic languages have sloughed off a certain number of endings, they have never done so to the radical degree that English has. For example, the kallar conjugation business acknowledged, not a single one of them in Europe does without classifying their nouns according to gender.
Gender, to an American English speaker, is like water fountains. An American in Paris may notice after a while that there are virtually no water fountains: long before bottled water became commonplace in America, having to buy it in Paris was a minor inconvenience that an American had to get used to. However, it was a mistake to think that an absence of water fountains was something particular to Paris, or even France. Water fountains are uncommon in Europe in general; it’s America that has been a little odd in having them in such proliferation.
In the same way, an English speaker trying a European language runs up against gender in Spanish’s el sombrero for the hat but la luna for the
When the Vikings came, one of their first tasks was to communicate with the Anglo-Saxons. This was not as tough a proposition for them as the one they would have faced had they invaded Greece. It is assumed that speakers of Old English and speakers of Old Norse could probably wangle a conversation. To ask “Do you have a horse to sell?” an Old English speaker would say “Haefst þu hors to sellenne?,” which would have made some kind of sense to an Old Norse speaker since in his language it went Hefir þu hross at selja ?
Understanding was one thing, but reproducing what he heard was another. For the Old Norse speaker, Old English was familiar but different, kind of like driving on the wrong (I mean, left!) side of the road in England feels to an American at first. Old English had endings in the same places and used in the same ways—but different endings. Take the word for “to deem, to judge”:
This was a basically bookless realm, recall, and so a Norseman did not see tables of endings laid out neatly on a page like this, nor did anyone teach him the language formally at all (short of perhaps being told occasional words , but that doesn’t allow you to express yourself). It was an oral world—people just talked; they didn’t write or read. The Norseman just heard these endings being used on the fly. It must have been confusing, and as such, tempting to just leave the endings off when speaking English, since he could be understood without them most of the time. This was the recipe for what eventually became Modern English, where the only remnant of the present-tense conjugations above is the third person singular - s , a little smudge left over from ye olde - th .
Yet, as always, the ancient world left us no actual descriptions of Vikings making their way in English and how well they did at it. We can infer a little from things like an eleventh-century inscription on a sundial, written in Old English by someone with a Scandinavian name, “Orm Gamalson”:
Orm Gamalsuna bohte Sanctus Gregorius minster tobrocan & tofalan & he hit let macan newan from grunde . . .
“Orm Gamalson bought St. Gregory’s minster broken and fallen down and had it made anew from the ground . . .”
Thus a Scandinavian was writing in English: that’s one glimpse at one Viking who wrapped his head around the language. But we’ll never know anything about Orm, including how he learned English, much less how he actually rendered it in his everyday speech. And that historiographical lacuna has allowed some linguists to propose that the Orm Gamalsons had nothing to do with English taking it all off.
They point out that Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish have lost almost as many endings as English has, and Dutch and Frisian are not too far behind them. In the present, for example, Swedish and friends even surpass English; here is how to conjugate “to call” in Swedish—i.e., you don’t!
But this observation misses the forest for the trees. While other Germanic languages have sloughed off a certain number of endings, they have never done so to the radical degree that English has. For example, the kallar conjugation business acknowledged, not a single one of them in Europe does without classifying their nouns according to gender.
Gender, to an American English speaker, is like water fountains. An American in Paris may notice after a while that there are virtually no water fountains: long before bottled water became commonplace in America, having to buy it in Paris was a minor inconvenience that an American had to get used to. However, it was a mistake to think that an absence of water fountains was something particular to Paris, or even France. Water fountains are uncommon in Europe in general; it’s America that has been a little odd in having them in such proliferation.
In the same way, an English speaker trying a European language runs up against gender in Spanish’s el sombrero for the hat but la luna for the
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