njtt writes:
> You won’t hear that at Language Log, of course, but you will hear plenty about it
> at lots of other blogs written by a wide variety of other scientists.
Some examples, please.
Well, there was a large area of close interaction, so that explains how those words got into the language. But I think everyone is trying a little too hard to make the whole Viking thing into a binary experience: Either they came for a raid that lasted maybe a day or they conquered an area and stayed for a century; nothing in between. And it’s not like the Danelaw had an impervious border, either.
Quite, not sure why it really matters. The upshot is that certain dialects in the UK are influenced by Scandinavian languages whether they were here for a day trip or stayed for a while. Those influences haven’t necessarily influenced “standard” English very much but then I don’t think anyone claimed it did.
Thomason and Kaufman devote a large portion of their book Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics to the “Norsification” of English, and offer much detail about Norse contacts and the many dialects of Old English in that era. They conclude that Middle English wasn’t genetically Northern Germanic, in part because the location in time and space of the Norsification did not coincide with Norse-speaking settlements. (Indeed much of the “Norsification” seems to have occurred long after the Norse settlers had shifted to an English dialect.)
Still, even if Faarlund is clearly wrong, is “close to nutcase raving” really a fair description? He’s a credentialed linguist; is he really considered a crackpot?
The idea that Middle English might have a Norse “genetic” component points to an interesting linguistic tenet: that a language has only one genetic parentage. Even if English doesn’t qualify as a 2-parent language, there are living languages whose parentage is controversial, notably Ma’a. Ma’a speakers are all fluent in a Shambala dialect (of the Bantu family); Dixon considers Ma’a to be genetically derived from that Shambala dialect but with a “secret” lexicon for communication with one’s clan, much as English Gypsies have their secret Romani lexicon. AngloRomani is classified as a dialect of English, yet the Bantu-based Ma’a is usually considered a Cushitic language! (One way to resolve this inconsistency is to admit that a hybrid language may not have a single clearcut genetic alignment.)
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Pretty sloppy writing, though, since how could English not be descended from something called “Old English”.
[/QUOTE]
I’m not sure what this means. If Gaulish were arbitrarily called “Old French”, it wouldn’t follow that it was ancestral to “French.” 
The Scandinavians who raided and the Scandinavians who settled were not necessarily from the same groups of Scandinavians and the potential and actual impact they might have had on the development of the English language would not have been the same. Vikings also settled certain parts of Scotland and Ireland and had different kinds of influences there. There were Scandinavian raiders who had settled in Ireland. The Normans were Scandinavians who had settled in France, and, thus, when they arrived in England, they brought French, not Scandinavian language influences.
This is wrong. Standard English itself was radically changed by Scandinavians—not by Scandinavians who raided at the coasts, but the Scandinavians who took over northern England. There was some influence in terms of vocabulary, but the main influence was in terms of radically altering English grammar.
Before the Danelaw, English was, like other West Germanic languages, a heavily inflected language, which indicated the grammatical role of nouns with suffixes. After the Danelaw, English grammar was a word-order-based language.
And this new English was not the English of London or the Danish of York. It was the English that developed along the border of the Danelaw, where Danish and English met and had to be reconciled.
It is the influence of the Danes that represents the stark difference between Beowulf:
And Chaucer:
I am not much inclined to waste a lot a lot of time combing through various scientists’ blogs looking for random examples of them complaining about bad science journalism, just to please you. I don’t keep records of my blog surfing, but I can assure you that I have seen a lot of it over many years of casual and unsystematic reading of blogs by scientists. Is there any particular reason that you find that hard to believe, or think I would be likely to lie about it?
I didn’t say that I didn’t believe you. I just want to know of some examples of such bad reporting. Partly this is because I think it would be fun to read about such examples. Partly this is because I would like to be able to use such examples when I’m talking about bad science reporting in the future. In any case, I would never hint that I think you’re lying. I would just say it outright. I don’t know of any reason to think that you’re lying about anything.
septimus writes:
> Still, even if Faarlund is clearly wrong, is “close to nutcase raving” really a fair
> description?
Well, I didn’t say that Faarlund and Emmonds themselves were engaged in nutcase raving. I said that “It’s amazing how many linguistic theories that come close to nutcase raving will get printed in popular science magazines and mainstream newspapers.” That is an exaggeration, I suppose, and Faarlund and Emmonds are not nearly the worst of such theories that got mentioned in mainstream magazines and newspaper. Still, I think that they did some pretty shoddy work for professionals in propounding that theory.
Ascenray, you are reading too much into to my comments. All I know is that Scandinavians had an influence on the words I use and the dialect I speak and understand. I don’t know nor care which Scandinavians they were nor what their plans were for an extended visit. It was mentioned upthread that they had no influence on English, I claim (correctly) that they certainly have had an effect on my English but as for a wider effect…I don’t know, I’ll leave that to the experts.