In September, Sherds attended a lecture given by Richard Dance, Professor of Early English in the Cambridge University Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, on the theme of ‘Vikings in your Vocabulary: Adventures in the History of English’, based on his Gersum Project (http://www.gersum.org) looking at the Scandinavian influence on our language.
Richard persuaded his audience to imagine they were out shopping for fish and eggs in a market in 10th-century England. Half the audience were given phrases in Old English and the other half in Old Norse, and the strong similarities between the two languages enabled each group to understand the other – more to the point, we speakers of modern English were able to recognise words in both languages, but it was Old Norse that was the most familiar in sentence structure and vocabulary.
It came as a surprise to many in the audience to discover that we speak as much ‘Viking’ today as we do Old English, and Richard went on to show his audience a long list of Norse-derived words in common contemporary usage – even more remain in use in the north of England. Many of the Norse words are single-syllable everyday words, such as ‘egg’, ‘fish’, ‘knife’, ‘bank’, ‘cake’, and ‘cut’ (as well as the millennials’ favourite: ‘awesome’, from agi, ‘terror’). This led Richard to explain that English is a ‘contact’ language that includes many words borrowed from other tongues (including Latin and Gaelic). Since the grammatical structure of Old Norse and Old English were already similar, it was easy for the populations of England in the 10th and 11th centuries to absorb new words into their own languages.
Excavating Hertfordshire