From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 62935
Date: 2009-02-09
>Thanks for the informative reply. One of these days I will try to
> 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
>