At 2:21:00 PM on Saturday, February 7, 2009, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> By the way, what are the traits in these
> Scandinavian-origin words or language that are
> distinctively Midlands rather than Old Northumbrian?
T&K list 33 specific items; I'll give a sample. The first
column gives the Midland form, the second the Nthmbr. OE
form.
uur(es) 'our(s)' u:ser, u:sr- ~ u:s-
a-bu(v)en 'above' bufa
be-forn 'before bi-fora
elder, eldest aeldra, aeldesta
shoon 'whoes' ji-sc^oe
childer 'children' c^ild(u)
bring 'to bring' breng^a
ni(gh)end 'ninth' ni(g)oþa
They say that the only undoubted Nthmbr. grammatical trait
in Northern ME is person marking on verbs: <-es> (23sing.
pres. indic. and impv. pl.), <-e> ~ <-es> (1sing. pres.
indic.), <-es> ~ <-e> (pres. indic. pl.), <-e> (inf.).
What they argue in considerable detail is that 'Norsified'
ME arose in Lindsey in the period 920-950, a time when Norse
was going out of use, and spread to Deira in the early 11th
century, and that Northern ME is essentially Midland English
with Northumbrian person markers and a modest number of
Norse grammatical traits -- of at least 260 grammatical
processes, affixes, and functions words used in Norsified
ME, they found just 57 that were clearly of Norse origin.
(They were interested in structural influence, so they did
not look at lexical borrowing in general.)
Section 9.8, 'English and other coastal Germanic languages,
or why English is not a mixed language', is about 70 pages
long, about 30 of which deal specifically with Norse
influence, so I'm not going to try to summarize the
arguments here.
Brian