English is a Scandinavian language

By Trine Nickelsen

Contrary to popular belief, the British did not 'borrow' words and concepts from the Norwegian and Danish Vikings and their descendants. What we call English is actually a form of Scandinavian.  


"Have you considered how easy it is for us Norwegians to learn English?" asks Jan Terje Faarlund, professor of linguistics at the University of Oslo. "Obviously there are many English words that resemble ours. But there is something more: its fundamental structure is strikingly similar to Norwegian. We avoid many of the usual mistakes because the grammar is more or less the same.

Faarlund and his colleague Joseph Emmonds, visiting professor from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, now believe they can prove that English is in reality a Scandinavian language, in other words it belongs to the Northern Germanic language group, just like Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese. This is totally new and breaks with what other language researchers and the rest of the world believe, namely that English descends directly from Old English. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is a West Germanic language, which the Angles and Saxons brought with them from Northern Germany and Southern Jylland when they settled in the British Isles in the fifth century.


"Modern English is a direct descendant of the language of Scandinavians who settled in the British Isles in the course of many centuries, before the French-speaking Normans conquered the country in 1066," says Faarlund. He points out that Old English and Modern English are two very different languages. Why?

"We believe it is because Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English," he says.

Click here to read this article from the University of Oslo

See also The History of English in Ten Minutes

Researchers ‘closer than ever’ to cracking 5000 year old writings

New technology has allowed researchers to come closer than ever to cracking the world’s oldest undeciphered writing system.

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton have developed a Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts to capture images of some of the world’s most important historical documents. Recently this system was used on objects held in the vaults of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

These images have now been made available online for free public access on the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative website.

Among the documents are manuscripts written in the so-called proto-Elamite writing system used in ancient Iran from 3,200 to 3,000 BC and which is the oldest undeciphered writing system currently known. By viewing extremely high quality images of these documents, and by sharing them with a community of scholars worldwide, the Oxford University team hope to crack the code once and for all.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

New dictionary on ancient Egyptian language completes 37-year project

A dictionary of thousands of words chronicling the everyday lives of people in ancient Egypt — including what taxes they paid, what they expected in a marriage and how much work they had to do for the government — has been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.

 The ancient language is Demotic Egyptian, a name given by the Greeks to denote it was the tongue of the demos, or common people. It was written as a flowing script and was used in Egypt from about 500 B.C. to 500 A.D., when the land was occupied and usually dominated by foreigners, including Persians, Greeks and Romans.

The language lives on today in words such as adobe, which came from the Egyptian word for brick. The word moved through Demotic, on to Arabic and eventually to Spain during the time of Islamic domination there, explained Janet Johnson, editor of the Chicago Demotic Dictionary.

Click here to read this article from History of the Ancient World

Anglo-Saxons and hand-saex

As an invitation to explore the wonders of Old English, hand-saex is certainly arresting.

The Dictionary of Old English, based at the University of Toronto (doe.utoronto.ca), offered hand-saex as last week’s “word of the week.” Reader Susannah Cameron spotted it and sent the reference to Word Play. “Have to admit it caught my attention,” she said.

 Sadly for anyone expecting new insight into the intimate practices of Anglo-Saxons between the years 600 and 1150, the word refers to a knife or dagger. The knife was a saex, also spelled seax and (yes) sex, and a hand-saex was a weapon held in one hand. The word for hand in Old English was hand. Very handy.

 Saex comes from a Germanic root (sah or sag) meaning to cut. It survives today only in the narrowly defined word sax, a tool used to trim roofing slates. But before the Norman Conquest of 1066 reshaped the English language and gave us Middle English – a process that took about a century to filter down to ordinary folks – saex was all the rage.

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

Old Irish words deciphered from Stowe Missal

Research into the Stowe Missal, an Irish manuscript written around 800 A.D., has led to the exciting discoveries of two new Old Irish verbs and several nouns from the text, which will help unlock mysteries in other Old Irish scripts.

Professor David Stifter detailed his findings at a lecture earlier this month at the National University of Ireland – Maynooth. In his lecture, Professor Stifter described his work, part of which involves the translation of a text in a famous liturgical manuscript, which is housed in the Royal Irish Academy, and is the source of much fascination to linguists, with many passages hitherto considered incomprehensible.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

The Good Book that turned the English language upside down

The King James Bible has been called the world’s most influential version of the most influential book in the most influential language. It is the Bible that travelled with British imperialism into the various dominions, and a newer version of that same Bible can be found in hotel rooms across North America.

When George Washington was sworn into office in 1789, he made an oath on the King James Version Bible. Every American president since – with the exception of John F. Kennedy who was a Catholic – has followed suit. And its influence on the English language is undeniable – Moby Dick and Martin Luther King’s speeches were infused with the language of the KJV, and when Linus takes to the stage to tell Charlie Brown what Christmas is all about in the holiday special, he quotes from the Luke Gospel in the KJV. (“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.”)

It’s been 400 years since its first publication in 1611. And even if it’s not as prevalent a part of the lives of the younger generation in an increasing secular world, the English language owes a debt to the King James Bible.

Click here to read this article from The Globe and Mail

Crusader inscription by Frederick II discovered in Israel

An Arabic inscription that bears the name of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, and the date “1229 of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus the Messiah”, was recently deciphered by Professor Moshe Sharon and Ami Shrager of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the deciphering it became evident that this is a rare archaeological find – the only one of its kind.

The 800-years-old inscription was fixed years ago in the wall of a building in Tel Aviv. The original location of the gray marble slab, on which the inscription is engraved, was probably in Jaffa’s city wall.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Vernon Manuscript aims to unlock West Midlands accent origins

Experts at the University of Birmingham are using a 600-year-old medieval manuscript to try to unlock the origins of the West Midlands accent.

The Vernon Manuscript, which dates back to about 1400, was written in the region's dialect. University researchers are asking local people to record parts of the text at a series of events.

They can then look at how the dialect has changed over time and what aspects are still used today.

Click here to read this article from the BBC

Database explains strange survival of irregular verbs

An historical study of the development of irregular verbs in the hundreds of Romance languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan has revealed how these structures survive. Experts have also examined why they are learned by successive generations despite ‘making no sense’ or, apparently, having any function in the language.

Oxford University has published an online database displaying the irregularities of the verb systems of 80 Romance languages and dialects – those that developed from Latin – to highlight the research. The database is useful to specialists and others with an interest in Romance languages.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net 

Latin dictionary is a lifetime career

For 32 years, Dr David Howlett has been scouring medieval Latin texts, picking out unusual words and compiling them in one of the world’s most extraordinary dictionaries.

But, if that sounds like a lifetime’s work, it’s just a fraction of the time spent by scholars on a monumental effort to record the definitions of every Latin word used in Britain for more than 1,000 years.

A century after the idea was first floated to the British Academy, experts are only now compiling definitions of words beginning with ‘T’ for the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources.

Click here to read this article from the Oxford Mail

See also Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources project nears completion

New book examines the influence of medieval Welsh on Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote: “I love Wales…and especially the Welsh language”. Now, a Cardiff University academic has explored Wales’ influence on Tolkien in the first book-length study of his debts to Welsh language and literature.

Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity traces the Welsh influences in Tolkien’s scholarly and creative work, paying particular attention to some relatively neglected texts. The book was officially launched last weekend.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources project nears completion

A huge number of students ranging from linguists to those studying coins and family ancestry are benefiting from a 100 year project to compile the world’s most comprehensive dictionary of Medieval Latin.

Work started on the unique Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources 50 years ago but experts began collecting material early in the 20th century.

Now the initiative is nearing completion and Professor Tobias Reinhardt, Corpus Christi Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Oxford University is responsible for seeing it through.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Learn Latin at Ohio Dominican University this summer

Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio is set to offer a summer program in Latin this summer. Under the direction of Dr. Matthew Ponesse, Associate Professor of History, the program is aimed at students pursuing graduate studies in the fields of medieval history, literature, philosophy, or theology.

The summer program begins on June 13th, with two courses offered concurrently: Beginner/Review course and Intermediate Medieval Latin. The latter will involve students reading Medieval Latin texts typically selected from the Vulgate Bible, sermons, hymns, chronicles, hagiographical texts, scholastic treatises and poetry.

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Google Translate goes Latin

In news that will be welcomed by many medieval and ancient history scholars, Google Translate has added Latin to its list of languages that can be automatically translated to other languages. The website announced the news today in a post written in Latin, entitled “Veni, vidi, verba verti” (I came, I saw, I translated the words) .

The statement, written by senior engineer Jakob Uszkoreit, continued: “Today, we announce the first language translation system by which no native speakers now make use of: the Latin. Being but a few speak Latin daily, year by year more than a hundred thousand American students receive the National Latin Exam. Besides many people all over the world study Latin.”

Click here to read this article from Medievalists.net

Historian reveals new insights into medieval rune stones

It was not necessary to be literate to be able to access rune carvings in the 11th century. At the same time those who could read were able to glean much more information from a rune stone than merely what was written in runes. This is shown in new research from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Rune stones are an important part of the Swedish cultural environment. Many of them are still standing in their original places and still bear witness about the inhabitants of the area from a thousand years ago. They thereby represent a unique source of knowledge about the Viking Age, providing us with glimpses of a period we otherwise would have known very little about. Among other themes, they tell us about family relations, travels, or matters of faith, and all of it in a language that scholars can understand fairly readily.

“The language and factual information of runic inscriptions are fairly well researched, but we know little about how Viking Age people read a rune stone,” says Marco Bianchi at the Department of Scandinavian Languages, whose dissertation investigates Viking Age written culture in the provinces of Uppland and Södermanland.

There are a number of inscriptions with runes that do not convey any linguistic meaning. In Uppland they are found both in areas that are rich in rune stones and in those that have very few.

“But the fewer rune stones there were in the vicinity, the poorer writers the carvers of these non-verbal inscriptions were. What was important was thus not to convey a linguistic message, but to create a rune carving that was perceived by the local people as credible,” claims Marco Bianchi.

However, rune stones entirely lacking in linguistic content are rather rare. On most rune stones you can read a little narrative in the form of a memorial inscription that often winds back and forth across a large stone surface. At first glance these runic inscriptions seem chaotic, but they are in fact very well structured. Usually they are meant to be read starting in the lower left-hand corner. Another observation Marco Bianchi makes is that many rune stones do not have any given reading order. Different parts of the inscription are in such cases visually separated from each other and can be read in any order the reader wishes.

“You can compare a rune stone text with a newspaper spread or a Web page, where the reader is attracted by headings and pictures,” says Marco Bianchi.

The visual design not only structures the linguistic message but complements and nuances it as well.

“On many rune stones the interplay between ornamentation and the runes is striking. To people of the Viking Age, the actual runes were only part of the message of the rune stone,” he says.

Marco Bianchi's dissertation, Runor som resurs: Vikingatida skriftkultur i Uppland och Södermanland (Runes as a resource: Viking Age written culture in Uppland and Södermanland) is available in Swedish and can be downloaded here.

Source: Uppsala University

University of Glasgow creates first Chair of Gaelic in Scotland

Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh has been named as the first ever established Chair of Gaelic in Scotland by the University of Glasgow. The Chair has been created to recognise the University as a centre of excellence for the study of Celtic and Gaelic.

Professor Ó Maolalaigh, who is also head of Celtic and Gaelic, said: “It is a huge honour to be named as the first ever established Chair of Gaelic in Scotland by the University of Glasgow. This underlines the university’s commitment to supporting the language and enhancing the cultural life of Scotland.

“The creation of the new Chair consolidates Glasgow’s status as the major urban home of Gaelic education, where it is possible to learn and study the language from nursery to post-doctoral level.”

Professor Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Dean of Arts at the University of Glasgow, added: ‘I am delighted to be able to announce the first ever established Chair of Gaelic at a Scottish university.

“Glasgow has taken a lead in Gaelic education and this appointment emphasises the faculty’s commitment to the outstanding research taking place in Celtic and Gaelic as part of our mission to bring the world to Scotland and Scotland to the world.”

Arthur Cormack, Chairman of Bòrd na Gàidhlig, the body set up by the Scottish Government to promote Gaelic, said: “Bòrd na Gàidhlig warmly welcomes this ground-breaking initiative by the University of Glasgow which gives the city’s historical associations with Gaelic a new impetus.

“Glasgow has always been a city of opportunity for Gaelic. The endorsement from such a venerable institution is a clear indication of the value that is increasingly being placed on Gaelic.

“The University has established itself as a world leader in Celtic and Gaelic education and research. It is entirely fitting that Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh be appointed as the first occupant of this Chair as he has done much over the years to further advance the cause of Gaelic both nationally and internationally.”

Minister for Skills and Lifelong Learning Keith Brown said: “This is very good news. This decision demonstrates Glasgow’s clear commitment to this important aspect of our heritage and raises the status of the Gaelic language in Scottish higher education. This is also very encouraging for all those involved at all levels in Gaelic promotion in the University, and in Scottish education generally.

“I would also like to commend the University authorities for this step and to offer my congratulations, (meal do naidheachd) to Professor O’ Maolalaigh on his appointment to this new Chair.”

Dublin-born Professor Ó Maolalaigh has been at the University of Glasgow since January 2005. He was previously Assistant Professor at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. He is Director of the British Academy-funded Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic project, which seeks to establish an online archive which will form the basis of future corpus and technological developments of the Gaelic language.

Professor Ó Maolalaigh is also involved in the £5 million SRDG project, Soillse, involving the Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and the University of the Highlands and Islands, which is developing a research capacity for the maintenance and revitalisation of Gaelic in Scotland. He was also responsible for the creation of the Gaelic Language Officer post at the University of Glasgow, the first post of its kind in Scotland.

A Chair of Gaelic Studies was established in 1983 at St Francis Xavier University, Antoginish, Canada, and has been occupied by Professor Kenneth E Nilsen since 1984. He has worked closely with the Department of Celtic and Gaelic at Glasgow.

The Chair of Celtic at the University of Glasgow was established in 1956. It is currently occupied by Professor Thomas Clancy.

Source: University of Glasgow

Pictish symbols revealed to be a written language

A new study has discovered that Picts, a people living in Scotland during the Early Middle Ages, did have a written language made from the symbols they inscribed in stone. A British team has been able to partially decipher these symbols using used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy which allowed them to spot the distinctive patterns characteristic of written language in the symbol stones.

"Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy," by Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman, has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society: A. The authors note that "over the last century, a wide variety of ‘meanings’ for the symbols have been proposed, from pagan religious imagery to heraldic arms, but it is only recently that the question as to whether they might be a written language has been asked."

By using mathematics and statistical analysis, the team was able to determine that that it is a written language and that the symbols probably represent particular words. The authors note that the next step in the process of understanding Pictish writing will be to catalogue all the remaining stones and symbols, of which at least 250 exist.

Rob Lee also told Discovery News that the many of the symbols appear to depict things like dogs, horses, trumpets, mirrors, combs, stags, weapons, crosses and Celtic knots. "It is unclear at the moment whether the imagery, such as the knots, form any part of the communication," Lee said.

The article also notes that by "demonstrating that the Pictish symbols are writing, with the symbols probably corresponding to words, opens a unique line of further research for historians and linguists investigating the Picts and how they viewed themselves."

The Picts were a confederation of Celtic tribes living in what was later to become eastern and northern Scotland from before the Roman conquest of Britain until the 10th century, when they merged with the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata to form the Kingdom of Alba (Scotland). By the 11th century the Pictish identity had merged with these other groups to form the Scottish people. Medieval historians have been researching the Picts in recent years, with many focusing on the stones and symbols they left behind.

Moreover, the Royal Society explains that by using this mathematical method, it "opens up the possibility that other ancient inscriptions could be similarly analysed, paving the way to vastly improved interpretation of many ancient languages that were previously thought undecipherable. Furthermore, the authors point out that similar techniques could be used to analyse animal noises, leading to the possibility of an enhanced understanding of animal communication."

Click here to read the article Pictish symbols revealed as a written language through application of Shannon entropy

Sources: Proceedings of the Royal Society: A, Royal Society, Discovery News

This is 15th Century English, but what does it say?

Salisbury Cathedral is asking medievalists for help in deciphering a mysterious inscription hidden behind a monument for hundreds of years.

The inscription, painted in black gothic letters, is thought to be one of the earliest written in English in any church in Britain, but it is so faded that it is unreadable.

The letters were painted on a thin layer of limewash that was partially scraped off before the monument to Sir Henry Hyde, a Royalist martyr executed during the Civil War, was erected in the early 1660s. In places, all that is left is a dark stain on the stonework where the paint leached through.

Tim Tatton-Brown, the cathedral’s Consultant Archaeologist, said “The Cathedral’s conservators quite unexpectedly found some beautifully written English text behind the Henry Hyde Monument on the cathedral’s South Aisle wall when the monument was temporarily removed as part of the on-going schedule of work.

“I had originally surmised the text dated from the sixteenth century, bearing in mind that the monument was erected soon after 1660. However our researches now suggest it was written a century earlier and therefore pre-dates the Reformation. My colleague Dr John Crook has made a comprehensive detailed photographic record of the script and subsequently enhanced the letter forms on his computer. Study of this by specialist academics is leaning towards the text being written in the fifteenth century, a period when English was, for the very first time, being used just occasionally in preference to Latin which was then ‘the norm’.”

John Crook is equally fascinated by the writing and what it is. “There are clearly several lines of a large textual inscription. There seems to be a phrase ‘and we are c…’ but so far we have not been able to work out more. If anyone thinks they can identify any further letters from the enhanced photographs, please contact us via Salisbury Cathedral website and I can trace them in.”

Tim Tatton Brown added, “So for now the basic questions of what exactly the words are and why the text was written on the cathedral wall, remain unanswered. It would be wonderful for us to solve the mystery.”

The Conservators’ work on The Hyde Monument has now been completed, the monument put back on the wall and the text once again hidden from view. Discussions are now taking place to decide the best way forward. Canon Treasurer, Mark Bonney, said “It’s a fascinating find but all these monuments the Conservators work on have to be put back into their places within a limited time span – and in this instance, by the middle of February. We think that the best approach is to consolidate the text to preserve it in its present state and then carry out a comprehensive photographic record of it before it is covered up again when the monument is returned to the wall. In many ways the text is far more vulnerable in its current state, exposed to the air, rather than hidden behind the Hyde monument.”

If you can offer any assistance, you can contact Salisbury Cathedral by email: visitors@salcath.co.uk

Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters

A ground-breaking new study of Irish Renaissance Latin was launched by members of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, University College Cork, last week.

Foregrounding the research of scholars attached to the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies in UCC, the collection of articles edited by Jason Harris and Keith Sidwell, Making Ireland Roman: Irish Neo-Latin Writers and the Republic of Letters (Cork University Press, 2009), examines for the first time a lost continent of Irish intellectual life from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Around 1,000 printed books in Latin were written by Irish authors between 1490 and 1750, and a vast manuscript corpus of Latin writing by Irishmen also survives from this period. Although modern scholars have tended to study English and Irish lanugage sources for the culture of Ireland at this time, much of the intellectual output aimed at an international scholarly community was composed in Latin. UCC's Centre for Neo-Latin Studies has pioneered new work in this area, and Making Ireland Roman is the first book to draw together the research of the Centre's scholars. Topics analysed include the earliest traces of the Renaissance in Ireland, the importance of style in writing Renaissance Latin, debates about political and national identities, and the efforts of prominent Irish scholars to record the history of their own country and intellectual traditions.

At a well-attended reception in the University College Cork, the newly-appointed Vice-Head of the College of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Social Sciences Professor Graham Allen of the School of English launched Making Ireland Roman. He commented on the continuing importance of Latin-language training for modern universities and remarked upon the vitality of the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies in UCC. After the launch, Professor Keith Sidwell of the University of Calgary, the former director of the Centre, gave a research paper on the 'lost literature' of early-modern Ireland, focusing upon Irish Latin poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Under its current director, Dr Jason Harris, the Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, School of History, UCC has secured funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences to study the earliest stages of the transmission of Renaissance ideas into Ireland. Dr Harris and Professor Sidwell are also collaborating on a large-scale survey of Irish writing in Latin c.1450-1750 which is due to be completed next year. The Centre's Neo-Latin Seminar continues to meet weekly to analyse Irish Latin texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Grammar of Medieval Greek project

A new Grammar will be the first comprehensive description of the medieval and early modern Greek language.

For the past five years, a team led by Professor David Holton of Cambridge University has been gathering, analysing and organising linguistic data for a new Greek Grammar. Co-directed by Professor Geoff Horrocks, the project is staffed by two full-time research associates, Dr Notis Toufexis and Ms Marjolijne Janssen, and two honorary consultants, Dr Io Manolessou and Dr Tina Lendari, and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Greek is one of the world’s oldest recorded languages, with a documented history spanning 34 centuries. Although scholars have analysed and described the Greek of the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods in detail, the linguistic situation is much less studied after the end of Antiquity. At around 1100 AD the beginnings of the modern vernacular first became evident, and over the next 600 years the language underwent significant changes, with the medieval vernacular gradually acquiring the morphological and syntactic features that are characteristic of Greek today.

Fortuitously, 1100–1700 is also a period in which texts in the vernacular are available in sufficient quantities for researchers to observe trends and identify the factors that influence variation. ‘But, despite the increasing availability of this material, there has been no systematic and detailed account of the development of the Greek language during this crucial period,’ said Professor Holton. ‘The Grammar aims to fill a serious gap in the history of Greek. This standard reference work will underpin a growing interest in medieval and early modern Greek literature and its historical, social and cultural context.’

The Grammar spans a geographical area from southern Italy to the Black Sea, encompassing written texts of all kinds, and giving a full account of linguistic developments within this period. It is a high-tech project, using electronic databases and digitised corpora to store and sort a mass of information.

The Grammar will contain a full description on all levels (phonology, morphology, syntax); information about the distributional patterns of variant forms and old vs. new formations; spelling and orthographic conventions of the period; and dialectal variation. It will also examine crucial diachronic issues, giving a full account of linguistic developments within the period, with information on the dating, first appearance and spread of various phenomena (looking both backwards to Ancient Greek and forwards to Modern Greek). Past linguistic scholarship on Medieval Greek will be re-evaluated; textual documentation and bibliographic guidance will be given for each phenomenon examined.

Once completed, the Grammar will be published by Cambridge University Press. For more information, please go to the Grammar of Medieval Greek Project website.