Re: Old Norse in English

well, if you trace back the roots of common daily English words, as well as
German or modern Scandinavian words, you' ll come in many cases to the same
roots anyway. So, if a word in English, or its preceding form in Old
English, looks quite similar to an Old Norse word, this can either mean it
came as a word borrowed from Old Norse into English at a certain time
(things like this happens often with words attached to certain things or
techniques which are introduced to places where they were not know before)
or it just means they share the same origin in very early Germanic times.
Especially with everyday words related to household, cattle, tools, etc. you
find a lot such words which are until to day very very similar all across
the Germanic languages, from German to Icelandic. This does not mean they
came to be borrowed from one language into the other at a certain point but
just have common ancestors. This is by the way all a very interesting topic
for long winter evenings with some big etymological dictionaries and a nice
pot of tea :-)
mona

----- Original Message -----
From: "Haukur Thorgeirsson" <haukurth@...>
To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 3:38 AM
Subject: Re: [norse_course] Old Norse in English


> > What perent of the English language
> > is rooted in Old Norse?
>
> I don't know and the question isn't really
> well defined. Here are two suggestions for
> better defined questions:
>
> 1. What percentage of the daily vocabulary of
> English (say, the 2000 most common words) is
> derived from Old Norse?
>
> 2. What percentage of the total dictionary
> vocabulary of English is derived from Old Norse words?
>
> I don't know about the absolute percentages but
> it is clear that the answer to question 2 is significantly
> lower than the answer to question 1. Most of the "extended"
> vocabulary of English is Graeco-Latin goobledygook.
>
> If you want my wild guess rather than your own then maybe
> 10-20% for question 1 and 1-2% for question 2. (But even
> those questions aren't very carefully defined.)
>
> There are certainly very many very common English words
> derived from Old Norse. Words like 'take' and 'knife' and
> even the pronoun 'they'.
>
> Kveðja,
> Haukur
>
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