The early contributions of Scandinavian to English are or two kinds – place-names and ordinary words... The most striking instance of a Danish place-name is by, a town... there are in the East of England more than 600 names of towns ending in –by. Whitby is the town on the white cliffs...There's more at the link.
By-law means a law specific to a particular town...
The most useful and most often used word the Scandinavians gave us is “are”. The pure English (Anglo Saxon) word for this would have been beoth or sinden. The Scandinavians also gave us the habit of using the word “to” before an infinitive...
Other old Norse words in English are:
Blunt, bole (of a tree), bound (on a journey), busk (to dress), cake, call, clog, clumsy, curl, cut, dairy, daze, dirt, droop, fellow, flit, hustings, ill, irk, kid, kindle, loft, odd, plough, root, scold, sky, tarn (a small mountain lake), weak and ugly…
Some other Old Norse words missing from this list might be: axle, blunder, dregs, gosling, hack, haggle, husband, knife, knot, lad, litmus, mire, mistake, oaf, ransack, reindeer, saga, scare, scarf, scathe, scrape, skill, skin, slaughter, sleuth (sloð means “trail”), take, thrall, troll, whirl, whisk, window (meaning wind-eye), work…
It was during the time when the English and Scandinavians lived side by side that we lost so many of the niceties of the language – not bothering any more with declensions and conjugations and with matching adjectives with their nouns in terms of gender and number etc. The adjective black can be applied to a cat whether male or female and to cats plural, without changing the ending. This was the biggest influence of the Scandinavians on our language...
From Norwegian
Aquavit (a kind of spirit distilled from potatoes), floe (as in ice floe), Kraken (sea monster), krill (small shrimp-like animals), lemming, quisling (from a wartime traitor, Vidkun Quisling), ski, slalom and Yngling (a sailing boat class from an old Norwegian word for “youngster.”
From Swedish
Angstrom (scientific measurement, from Anders Angstrom), gravlax (preserved salmon – originally “grave salmon” as it was preserved underground), moped, ombudsman, orienteering, smorgasbord (sandwich table), tungsten (meaning hard stone)
From Danish
Frisbee is an interesting one. Inspiration for the toy came from the airworthy pie tins of the Frisbie Bakery in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The family name comes from a place in Leicestershire called Frisby on the Wreak, the name meaning “farmstead or village of the Frisians” – there’s that by ending again…
17 August 2010
English words of Scandinavian origin
Much of the following comes from The English Language – Grammar, History, Literature by Professor Meiklejohn, printed in 1905, collected by Pat English for her blog, The Squirrelbasket.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Seen an interesting documentary on the Normans last night. They mentioned a lot of words of French had made it into the English common vocabulary. Lots of food items, for example 'pig' became 'pork', after it left the field, was cooked and then put on a plate. The same for sheep/mutton. The french terms usually used by the upper classes. Interesting stuff!
ReplyDelete"Thorpe" is another common old Norse suffix in place names; it means village, and is very common in the part of Lincolnshire where I was born. "Toft" (house) and "Holme" (inlet) also crop up very frequently in the area. Cleethorpes, Grimsby, Langtoft, Sandtoft, Axeholme (fabulous) and Swanholme are all place names I grew up with.
ReplyDeleteThere was also a thriving Viking population in Yorkshire, where my in-laws live; York itself still has a number of surviving Viking roadways with their original names within the ancient city walls. My favourite is Goodramgate, named for Gudram, the first Danish King of East Anglia. The city's well worth a visit if you're interested in the Viking history of the UK.