Hi Imre,
Well, I think you also ought to consider "Low German"
(Niederdeutsch), because Hochdeutsch really is the language
of Southern Germany, which differs in many respects from the
Anglo-Saxon that you are interested in.

Low German, Frisian and Dutch are really much closer
to Old English.


About the language of the oldest runic inscriptions, the
experts differ. People from the West Germanic regions
seem to wish to equate Scandinavian with Anglo-Saxon
at around the year zero. I do not know what reasons
they have for this, but I suspect it is motivated in a
kind of cultural imperialism, just like Grimm by linguistic
means tried to "prove" that Jutland really belonged to
Germany, which was used to motivate several campaigns of
suppression.

Remember that the earliest runes (ca. 200 AD or somewhat
earlier) are very few, and that there are not many other
records of the Scandinavian tongue as early as that.

What I should like to look into, are the vocabularies of
Old Norse, as compared with Old English. Are the words
basically all adaptions of the same roots, or do the Scandinavian
languages contain many roots (what percentage?) that are not
found in Old English?


Vale,
Xigung.

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Imre <hobbi-germanista@...> wrote:
>
>
> Dear Haukur, Diego, Xigung and Llama nom,
>
> thanks for the contributions from all of you, indeed. Meanwhile I have
> realized that my question was somewhat improper, as it is very
difficult
> to say if two similar tongues can be considered dialects of the very
> same languages or two separate languages. Separate statehood of
> the speakers might contribute to considering them separate
> languages, just as in case of the split of the former Yugoslavia, the
> once "indivisible" Serbo-Croat today is considered to be 3 separate
> languages, such as Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, though difference
> may be less significant between Bosnian and Serbian than Swiss
> German and Hochdeutsch (the latter two are thought to be the same
> language).
>
> It could have been similar in the age of shifting from common-Germanic
> to Western-Germanic languages and Old Norse. Since this was
> continuous we could only set a symbolic date or estimate a longer
> period during which it could have happened. But of course mutual
> intelligibility does not end at the time when the dialects split >into

> separate languages, e.g. written Dutch is more or less intelligible to
> German-speakers, or Estonian is also understandable to Finns in some
> extent. But because of the mutual intelligibility no one would say that
> these are dialects of the very same language, any longer.
>
> The reason for my question was that I wanted to when the Old Norse
> word `lög' acquired the meaning `law'. According to my "presumption #
> 1", this must have happened after that Old Norse and West Germanic
> languages split form each other, because the English cognate `lay' and
> German cognate `Lage' do not have the same meaning as `lög'.
>
> But again ("presumption #2") – since dialects can be well different
> before formally splitting into different languages – it could have
> happened that in the Northern dialects of the common-Germanic the
> proto-Germanic *'lag' (or whatever the correct form may have been)
> already had the meaning "law" (or some kind of commonly accepted
> social custom etc.), but not in the West or East dialects.
>
> This latter argument could be supported by the fact that German and
> OE both use words ("Gesetz" and "gesetnys") with the similar original
> meaning: "setzen" and "to set" also have the same primary meaning
> as Swedish "lägga" (`to lay') and ON "leggja", both having the primary
> meaning `to lay, to put, to set etc.'. I presume that the Northern
> dialects and Western dialects meant the same thing, but one of the
> dialects shifted to an other word, though a secondary meaning
> (i.e. `law') of "*lag" could have been intelligible to the Western
dialects
> or a secondary meaning of the word "*set" or "*geset" (or whatever
> the correct proto-Germanic may have been) could have been
> understandable to the speakers of the Northern dialects, e.g. Swedish
> still has the verb "sätte" with a similar meaning as German "setzen"
> and English "to set".
>
> Greetings,
>
> Imre