Viking Language (Part 3): Cognates & Borrowings
There are many words in English that are similar to Old Norse. For example, dale and dalr; take and taka. Words like these fall into one of two categories: cognates or borrowings.
Cognate is a Latin term, and means “related by having the same ancestor”. This means words that come from the same “parent” language.
Old Norse & English both come from Proto-Germanic, which was spoken in parts of Northern Europe between 500 BC and 1000 AD. Proto-Germanic then split into dialects, and many words stayed similar.
For example, the word “father”, which is fadar (Gothic), faeder (Old English), fader (Old Saxon), fater (Old High German), and faðer (Old Norse).
Here are some more English-Old Norse cognates:
Nouns
son - sonr
ship - skip
king - konungr
weapon - vápn
hand - hönd
brother - bróðir
land - land
day - dagr
Adjectives
little - líttil
small - smár
good - góðr
few - fár
first - fyrstr
wise - viss
dead - dauðr
long - langr
Verbs
to come - koma
to bear - bera
to say - segja
to will - vilja
to have - hafa
to give - gefa
to let - láta
to ride - riða
Some cognates were lost by the time Old English became Modern English. The old-fashioned word “quoth” is like the Old Norse kveða (to say); “sooth” is like the Old Norse sannr (true).
Some cognates only survive in compounds, not on their own. The second syllable in “blackmail” is cognate with the Old Norse mál (speech).
Borrowings are loan words. During the Viking Age, Scandinavian conquest, settlement and trade throughout Western, Eastern and Central Europe meant that many words were taken into other languages as borrowings. Some of them are still in those languages today.
The Danelaw
In 790, the Vikings began raiding England. In 865, the Great Army (mostly Danes) arrived in East Anglia, and conquered York (then called Eoforwic) the next year. Eoforwic then became the Viking Kingdom of Jórvík, and Norse settlement in the area began.
In the late 800's, Alfred the Great defeated the Danes, and they withdrew north, settling among the Saxon population. (Their territory still included Jórvík.)
The last Viking King of Jórvík, Eirik Bloodaxe, was killed in 954, and the English re-conquered the Danelaw. The Norse settlers were integrated into the English Kingdom.
Because Old English & Old Norse were related anyway, this made it easier to borrow words into the English language. Some of them were basic grammatical words, such as “they” (from þeir), “their” (from þeira), and “them” (from þeim).
Most words in English beginning with sc- or sk- are borrowings from Old Norse (such as scrape, skill & sky). Most words beginning with sh- are of English origin (such as shape, shell & short). Sometimes, the Old Norse borrowing and its Old English cognate both survive in Modern English – such as shirt & skirt.
There are at least 900 Old Norse borrowings in Modern English. They include: cast kasta; hit hitta; low lágr; egg egg; same samr; want vanta; wrong rangr; law lög; outlaw útlagi; viking víkingr; fjord fjörða.
The word “husband” comes from the Old Norse húsbóndi, which is a compound word, made up of hús + bóndi (house + farmer/landowner), and means “the master of the house”. This is also where we get the word “husbandry”.
In the region that was the Danelaw, the local dialect there has many borrowings. For example: garth for “yard”, from ON garðr; beck for “stream”, from ON bekkr; and mickle for “much”, from ON mikill.
Also, many place-names in the Danelaw region have Norse elements, such as those ending with -by and -thorpe, from Old Norse bær & þorp (farmstead). Many parish names are also of Old Norse origin.
Until 1974, Yorkshire was divided into North Riding, East Riding, and West Riding. This actually has nothing to do with horses. The ON word þriðjungr means the 3rd (þriði) part of an assembly, or a geographical region. This was taken into Old English as þriðing.
The word continued into Middle English, and was still used for the three districts. It was adopted into Medieval Latin as tridingum. The “th” has been dropped since then, and now we have “riding”.
The modern word was taken by British colonial administrators to Canada. It is now used in some parts of the country to refer to a parliamentary constituency.
Unlike in England, very few borrowings from Old Norse have survived in Irish- or Russian-speaking areas, even though there were many Viking settlements there. This is probably because Old Norse is not as similar to those languages as it is to English.
Normandy
The Vikings started settling in Normandy (northern France) during the 800′s. In 911, the Frankish King Charles the Simple gave lands around Rouen (at the mouth of the Seine) to the Viking chieftain Hrólfr.
Hrólfr (Rollo) became a vassal of the Frankish King. He defended the region against further Viking incursions. The settlers & their descendants established the duchy of Normandy, which was powerful from the 900′s to the 1100′s.
In the duchy’s early years, Rollo’s Norse followers were joined by small Viking warbands, and probably some Anglo-Scandinavian settlers as well. In the western Cotentin region, the Scandinavian settlers were mostly Norwegians. They may have come from Viking encampments in Ireland.
800′s Frankish administrative districts of Normandy.
The Vikings in Normandy were politically dominant, but never grew very large. The settlers kept contact with the Old Norse world until the beginning of the 1000′s. However, by then (since about 50 years after 911), they’d lost most of their own language, and now spoke the local Old French dialects of langue d’oïl (derived from Vulgar Latin).
There are still remnants of Old Norse in local place names. For example, La Londe “grove” (ON lundr), and Bricquebec “slope” (ON brekka).
Also, many words & terms survived in the local Norman dialects of French, but in the mid-1900′s, these dialects mostly died out. And they never had much of an influence on Modern French, unlike the inland dialects (Normandy was too far away from the centre of French power & culture.)
The remnants of Old Norse in Modern French are mostly to do with the sea. For example, vague “wave” (ON vágr), crique “creek” (ON kriki), and equiper “to equip” (ON skipa “fit out a ship”).