The Scandinavian invasion and its effect on English

In the 8^th – 9^th c. Britain was raided and attacked by the Danes/Scandinavians/Vikings. Only Alfred the Great of Wessex kept them away. In 878 the Treaty of Wedmore was signed and England was divided into Wessex (belonged to Alfred) and Danelaw (belonged to the Danes). The Scandinavian dialects belonged to the Germanic group, the Danes soon linguistically merged into the local OE dialects leaving some Scandinavian elements.

Scandinavian borrowings came to English from Northern and North-Eastern Dialects.

Ways of Borrowing: Scandinavian borrowings penetrated only through oral speech as far as the Scandinavians had never been too eager to come to the power wherever they went. They were just raiders.

Assimilation of Borrowings: Scandinavian borrowings were easier to assimilate as far as the Scandinavian Dialects as well as OE Dialects were Germanic dialects (they all belonged to one and the same L group). So the Ls were very similar and the assimilation was easy.

Semantic Fields: • everyday life (cake, raft, skirt, birth, dirt, fellow, root, window, to die, etc.); • military (knife, fleet, etc.); • legal matters (law, husband, etc.); • some pronouns and conjunctions (they, their, them, both, though, etc.); • essential notion (N scar, anger; V to call, to take, to want to kill, to cast, to scare; Adj happy, ill, weak, wrong; Pron same, both; Prep till, fro, etc.).

Recognition in ModE: Scandinavian borrowings are hard to distinguish from the native words as far as Scandinavian Dialects belonged to the same L group (Germanic). The only distinctive Scandinavian feature in English: Scandinavian cluster [sk] (sky, skill, skin, skirt, etc.);

Scandinavian Contributions: • A lot of Scandinavian borrowings disappeared, some were left only in dialects; • Some Scandinavian borrowings replaced the native words (they, take, call, etc.); • Scandinavian borrowings enlarged the number of synonyms in English: native to blossom – Scan. borr. to bloom, native wish – Scan. borr. want, native heaven – Scan. borr. sky, etc.

9,10,11. The OE vowel system (monophthongs and diphthongs). Major changes.

Unstressed vowels were weakened and dropped. Stressed vowels underwent some changes: splitting – 1 phoneme split into several allophones which later become separate phonemes (e.g. a  {a, ã, æ}); merging – separate phonemes become allophones of one phoneme and then disappear and are not distinguished any more as separate phonemes (e.g. a:  (o:, æ:)

In PG there were no diphthongs. There was just a sequence of two separate vowels. Diphthongs appeared in OE: some (usually long diphthongs) – as a result of merging of two vowels: a + u → ea; e + u → eo; (i + u → (io:) (dialectal variant).

Others (usually short diphthongs) – as a result of the influence of the succeeding and preceding consonants (breaking of [æ, e]).

Palatal Mutation/i-Umlaut Mutation – a change of one vowel to another one under the influence of a vowel in the following syllable.

Palatal mutation (or i-Umlaut) happened in the 6th -7th c. and was shared by all Old Germanic Ls, except Gothic (that’s why later it will be used for comparison).

Palatal mutation – fronting and raising of vowels under the influence of [i] and [j] in the following syllable (to approach the articulation of these two sounds). As a result of palatal mutation:

• [i] and [j] disappeared in the following syllable sometimes leading to the doubling of a consonant in this syllable;

• new vowels appeared in OE ([ie, y]) as a result of merging and splitting: a, o, æ → e; a: → æ:; ŏ/ō → ĕ/ē; ŭ/ū → ŷ/ỹ (labialised) (new!); ĕă/ēā, ĕŏ/ēō → ĭě/īē (new!)

Traces of i-Umlaut in Modern English: 1. irregular Plural of nouns (man – men; tooth – teeth); 2. irregular verbs and adjectives (told ←tell; sold ←sell; old – elder); 3. word-formation with sound interchange (long – length; blood – bleed).

OE Vowel System (symmetrical, i.e each short vowel had its long variant).

The length of vowels was phonologically relevant (i.e. served to distinguish words): e.g. (OE) is (is) – īs (ice); col (coal) –cōl (cool); god (god) – gōd (good), etc.