THE SCANDINAVIAN INVASION AND ITS EFFECT ON ENGLISH.

In the 8^th – 9^th c. Britain was raided and attacked by the Danes/Scandinavians/Vikings. Only Alfred the Great of Wessex kept them away. In 878 the Treaty of Wedmore was signed and England was divided into Wessex (belonged to Alfred) and Danelaw (belonged to the Danes). The Scandinavian dialects belonged to the Germanic group, the Danes soon linguistically merged into the local OE dialects leaving some Scandinavian elements.

Scandinavian borrowings came to English from Northern and North-Eastern Dialects.

Ways of Borrowing : Scandinavian borrowings penetrated only through oral speech .

Assimilation of Borrowings : Scandinavian borrowings were easier to assimilate as far as the Scandinavian Dialects as well as OE Dialects were Germanic dialects (they all belonged to one and the same L group). So the Ls were very similar and the assimilation was easy.

Semantic Fields: • everyday life (cake, raft, skirt, birth, dirt, fellow, root, window, to die, etc.); • military (knife, fleet, etc.); • legal matters (law, husband, etc.); • some pronouns and conjunctions (they, their, them, both, though, etc.); • essential notion (N scar, anger; V to call, to take, to want to kill, to cast, to scare; Adj happy, ill, weak, wrong; Pron same, both; Prep till, fro, etc.).

Recognition in ModE : The only distinctive Scandinavian feature in English: Scandinavian cluster [sk] (sky, skill, skin, skirt, etc.);

Scandinavian Contributions: • A lot of Scandinavian borrowings disappeared, some were left only in dialects; • Some Scandinavian borrowings replaced the native words (they, take, call, etc.); • Scandinavian borrowings enlarged the number of synonyms in English: native to blossom – Scan. borr. to bloom, native wish – Scan. borr. want, native heaven – Scan. borr. sky, etc.

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