Учебное пособие для специальностей «Переводческое дело» и«Иностранный язык: два иностранных языка»
§ 2. Scandinavian influence on the English language
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| § 2. Scandinavian influence on the English language
The Scandinavian Conquest had a great effect on the English language. The Scandinavian dialects spoken by the invaders belonged to the North Germanic languages and their phonetic and grammatical structures were similar to those of Old English. Close relationship between English and Scandinavian dialects made mutual understanding quite possible even without translation. Due to the contacts and mixture with Scandinavian, the Old English language acquired numerous Scandinavian features. The result was a blending of Scandinavian and English dialects, especially in the North and East. Scandinavian influence was felt both in the vocabulary and morphology. Scandinavian borrowings cannot be referred to any definite semantic spheres, though almost all of them denote things used in every-day life. Among Scandinavian borrowings we find such Modern English words as husband, fellow, wrong, to call, to take (Sc. feolaʒa, husbonda, wrang, kalla, taka ), etc. Even the 3 rd person plural pronoun was taken over from Scandinavian into English. The Scandinavian pronoun ƥ eir penetrated into English and, superseding the OE pronoun hīe, became MnE they. In a similar way there appeared pronouns their and them . 30 The result of Scandinavian settling may be seen in more than 1400 places in England having Scandinavian names, largely in the North and East where most of the invaders settled. Scandinavian elements are found in geographical names: - ending in - by ( by is the Danish word for “town”), e.g. Grimsby, Whitby, Derby; - adding -thorp „village‟, as in Woodthorp, Althorp, Linthorp; - adding -thwaite , “an isolated piece of ground”, as Applethwaite; - adding –toft, „a messuage‟ (a dwelling-house with adjacent buildings and adjoining lands), as in Langtoft, Eastoft, Nortoft. The similarity of Old English and the language of the invaders makes it at times difficult to define a given word as a native one or a borrowing. In certain cases, however, there are reliable criteria for recognizing a borrowed word. The principal ones are as follows: a) the development of the sound combination [ sk ], written in OE as sc ; In Old English sc was palatalized to “ sh ”-sound [ʃ] (still written as “ sc ”), while in the Scandinavian countries it retained its hard sk- sound. Consequently, while native words like ship, fish, shine, shield, etc., have “ sh ” [ʃ] in Modern English, words borrowed from Scandinavians are generally still pronounced with [ sk ] : sky, skin, skull, scrub, scare, bask. Old English scyrte has become “ shirt ”, while the sounding alike Old Norse form scyrta turned into skirt. b) in the same way the retention of the hard pronunciation of “ k ” and “ g ” in such words as kid, dike, get, give, gild, egg, is an indication of the Scandinavian origin. For instance, we would be saying yive as Chaucer did but for the Scandinavian influence, for жүктеу/скачать 1,38 Mb. Достарыңызбен бөлісу:
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