English evolved from Scandinavian?

"The English language brings out the best in the Irish. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth." T E Kalem —from Brendan Behan's play, Borstal Boy

A Science Daily post from Nov, 2012 suggests that English evolved from Scandinavian. Two professors in Norway make an interesting hypothesis that English evolved from Old Norse, making English North Germanic rather than West Germanic.

Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo said: "What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true—the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them," says Faarlund.

Here are some examples: anger, awe, bag, band, big, birth, both, bull, cake, call, cast, cosy, cross, die, dirt, dream, egg, fellow, flat, gain, get, gift, give, guess, guest, hug, husband, ill, kid, law, leg, lift, likely, link, loan, loose, low, mistake, odd, race, raise, root, rotten, same, seat, seem, sister, skill, skin, skirt, sky, steak, though, thrive, Thursday, tight, till, trust, ugly, want, weak, window, wing, wrong. —Linguist Makes Sensational Claim: English Is a Scandinavian Language

I nearly snorted and circular breathed in my cuppa tea when I read that headline. I can hear the linguistic shit hitting the fan now.

Awww, there goes Beowulf!

So, let me get this straight, Everyone in the British Isles loved the Norse so much,   (they refused to have much to do with the invaders), that they couldn't even say Gimme an egg, Sister! in their own language(s) before the arrival of the Vikings? (It was mainly the Anglo—Saxons vs the short-lived Viking Danelaw (50 to 100 years of rule); most of the Britons were holed up in Wales or Brittany.

Sister and egg aren't even loan words ferhevinsakes! I'm no linguist but even I can poke holes in this argument. People usually borrow words and concepts for new things like computer, floppy disk, USB. Not for things they already know, or already have.

What would Bede say? All this splitting infinitives and hairs sounds like the Scandinavians are once again being culture pirates. A vikingr the academics will go.

Their hypothesis: English evolved out of Old Norse several centuries later? Not congruently? What about language drift, or convergent evolution—or even being closely related via the Indo-European continuum? It's like saying English (or Irish) evolved from Sanskrit because there are parallel words in both languages.

Sister is a prime example from the Proto-Indo-European continuum: *swésōr is recognizable and sounds familiar enough to be merely a dialect, rather than another language. No matter how many dialect armies and navys are conjured up, I'm fairly certain that Old Norse did not exist during the era that PIE was evolving. And then there's egg—clearly a very close word in Proto-Germanic:

From Middle English egge, from Old Norse egg (“egg”), from Proto-Germanic *ajją (“egg”).

Well, maybe egg isn't such a good example as Chaucer uses both ey, and egg. That could be a case of Norse and Anglo-Saxon eggs side by side. One could argue that that hard gg vs soft jj sound was borrowed from the Norse. I won't mention bull eggs here. (But you can look that world up if you like).

I wonder why outlaw wasn't on that list? That and law, and penny, schilling, etc.

The article was daft. (Not as daft as the eejit who recently posted that English has always existed in Great Britain. (MJ Harper, ‘The History of Britain Revealed’) The Belgae in Gaul and Britain were Celts, not Germans, ya twit. (It reads something like How the Martians Saved Civilization.) English ain't the mother tongue. Really.) Whose tongue was in what neither cheek?

Then there's the syntax argument:

•(subject/verb/object), SVO vs. Old English verb endings. Just to liven things up, Irish is VSOP. Good initials for brandy too. The Vikings, though they settled in Ireland too, had almost no impact on Irish other than town words, nautical terms, jarl, and window.

•Prepositions at the end of a sentence (a very good thing they didn't look at Irish!)

•My personal favorite: genitive (plural)s (The Queen of England's hat).

•Split infinitives (I promise to never laugh again). Well, there are no infinitive verbs in Irish, but we're not talking Irish here.

I admit I'm shaky on syntax. I know by doing. (By writing, that is). But since I had to go and make that strange segue, apparently the Norse absorbed more Irish words than the Irish themselves did of Old Norse words: "bachall (staff, crozier) >bagall; capall (horse) > kapall; lám (hand) > lámr; tarb (bull) > tarfr; and teine (fire) > dini.

Perhaps most surprisingly of all, one Norse word for a ship lung is taken from the Irish long." —Medieval Review Ó Muirithe, Diarmaid. From the Viking Word-Hoard: A Dictionary of Scandinavian Words in the Languages of Britain and Ireland. Dublin.

I'm sure I could argue some silly string theory that Gaelic impacted Old Norse, as spoken by Vikings, who, were, after a generation or two, no longer even Norse, but Norse-Irish, and Norse-Scottish. Irish and Scottish were pretty much the same people in those days as there was no Kingdom of Scotland yet. I can't use the term "one people" because nobody was unified.

Viking men did not bring any Norse women with them when they settled new turf. They just kidnapped Irish and Scottish women—and women are the bearers of language and culture—they taught their kids to speak Irish. And to a lesser degree, Norse British/Anglo-Saxon, mix, etc. (Iceland and the Faroes have a higher Irish/Scottish mDNA, than Norse yDNA but I already wrote about that).

So why would Old English suddenly die out, leave a linguistic void, and Old Norse suddenly take its place, and then evolve into modern English? Old habits die hard. We won't mention the other four English dialects that concurrently existed in the British Isles. Who has read Beowulf, or Sir Gawain in the original dialect? Or Blind Harry's Wallace?

OK, so the "Pearl Poet" author of Sir Gawain was from ca. the 14th c., as were Blind Harry, and Chaucer a little before that, and Beowulf was written in the late 10th or early 11th c., but the texts do serve to demonstrate that several different Middle English dialects survived, Not Old Norse. BTW, Beowulf was translated into late West Saxon from an older English dialect.

Clearly this is a case of lunatic fringe instead of Celtic Fringe. Like I said, those Norse academicians are cultural pirates! I don't think anyone was hypothetically sober at the time. Bring on Monty Python's version of Njall's Saga! Skol pafiskin!

Folklore: Charm to ward off bad luck

Genre: Proverb/charm, Provençal?  (myself)
December, 2, 2001

Avanti, avanti, maleficium defense
(avantee, avantee mal-le feecee-ium defance)
out out evil protect Out, out evilness, and protect (me?)
honi soit qui male pense. let there be no thoughts which are bad.
(oni swoa kay mal-ee pance)
it that bad and thought

I first learned the proverb from a former boyfriend, poet John Oliver Simon (b. 1942), of Berkeley, Ca., ca. 1982. He used “Avanti” as a preventative magic superstition charm to ward off evil. The first time he used it was when he ritually smudged his house with sage to purify it ca. 1982, and another time, when we were in San Cristobál de las Casas, Chíapas, México, in the mid-’80s, during the New Age event, the Harmonic Convergence, touted by José and Ivan Argüelles.

But instead of harmony, it was as if the dead and the devils were truly on the rampage. While hiking, we met a gringa (American) who had been raped, and someone else was just murdered on the trail we were on....we were too close to the underbelly of the world.

The night of the so-called Convergence, I had nightmares that the dead were after me, and I kept waking up, screaming my lungs out, with my hands in the aura where their ghostly green presence was. After my third nightmare, John felt the need to purify us. He said “Avanti” was an old Provençal proverb from the Middle Ages, and he’d successfully used it as a charm for 20 years.

Still I was haunted, so we gave up the idea of sleep, climbed onto the roof and sat back-to-back with our elbows interlocked and chanted the charm as we watched the stars while waiting for dawn to arrive.

When I described the strange dead woman who visited me in my dreams that night, John said he recognized her; I’d described how she dressed, demonstrated how she stood, hand on hip, pointing to John. She had a message for him, but I couldn’t make it out. He said, “That’s Mickela, in Berkeley. Something’s happened.” I hadn’t a clue who Mikela was.

But next morning, a telegram arrived from the poet Alta, John’s former wife: Mikela died that night. The first apparition was a friend of mine, poet Dave Evans,—I wondered why he was in my dream.

When I returned home to the States months later, I learned Dave Evans had died that week of a heart attack. The third apparition was demonic, perhaps Jaguar & it wanted me. My Irish grandmother had the gift of the Second Sight, I’d dreamt of the deaths of Borg Haugen, and a poet-friend Boschka Layton, (sister of Donald Sutherland, & wife of poet Irving Layton), but I never dreampt of someone I didn’t know, and for another person. I’ve no explanation for it, as I don’t tend to place much stock in it. However, if I’m in a tight situation, I will say “Avanti.”

In an attempt to track down the origin of this proverb, I asked far and wide, to no avail, I couldn’t even get anyone to help me translate it. I was told it was medieval Provençal, but how could I prove it? It kept niggling at me. I knew this proverb from somewhere else, but where?

The only clue I had to go by was the 1994 movie, “The Madness of King George,” the king wears blue ribbons (the Order of the Garter) around his calves with the proverb printed on them. So I began to think of knights, and a UC Berkeley linguist, Renee Perelmuttter, said, “Isn’t that from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? He wears it on his girdle to remind himself of his foolishness. And then all the knights wore girdles too.”

Then I began to harbor some anatomical worries. Seething like Malvolio at cross-purposes with his garters, I pondered: why did they confuse girdles which presumably go around a man’s waist, to garters, which hold up one’s stockings around the calf or thigh?

The last line in the 1959 Penguin edition of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” indeed ends with: “HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE” (p 125). It is not in most of the Sir Gawain tales. I looked at 5 other tales. This particular version of Sir Gawain comes from the 14th c. Cotton Collection MS, Nero Ax, in the British Museum. A footnote revealed: “The conjunction of the green baldric and the motto of the Order of the Garter; but that order was founded by Edward III, in about 1347...” It went on to say that the Green Knight was originally associated with the Order of the Bath. And “Ritual purification of knights by bathing appears to have been practiced by the English as long ago as the 11th c.” Henry IV formalized the Order in 1349. So we have a terminus ante quem of the early to mid-14th c; and a possible 11th c. source. Since the story Sir Gawain is a Romantic reworking of an older Celtic tale (it first appears in the Ulster Cycle, in the 12th c. MS, Leabhar nahUidre), further research into Medieval French courtly poetry is required to see if I can locate the first line of the proverb.

UC Berkeley Folklore Collections
Kroeber Hall, Dr. Alan Dundes