Then Came The Ninth-Century Viking Raids, Which Influenced Morphology.

[rionaleonhart]

Right. On the one hand, I have an exam on the history of the English language on Wednesday, for which I need to revise. On the other, I really just want to hang around on Livejournal.

THE OBVIOUS SOLUTION: COMBINE THE TWO.

YOU ARE GOING TO LEARN THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES AND ITS IMPACT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE AND YOU ARE GOING TO

Comments

[rionaleonhart]

I'm very glad people have actually found it interesting! I love the English language, but I wasn't sure whether HERE ARE MY REVISION NOTES would really make a great Livejournal entry.

[wanttobeatree]

I READ IT ALL AND NOW I MISS ENGLISH LANGUAGE :(

Also, what up, pig hill. What up.

[rionaleonhart]

ENGLISH LANGUAGE IS THE BEST THING EVER. I don't know how I coped without it at A Level.

WAIT NO I MEANT YOU'RE NOT MISSING ANYTHING, TREE, DON'T BE SAD.

At least your hometown has a fairly amazing name?

[wanttobeatree]

WE DO ~CLOSE READING~ SOMETIMES, WHICH IS KINDA LIKE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. It's EngLang Lite, but it gives me a little of what I neeeeed.

It is quite amazing. I am massively fond of living on a hill o' pig.

[gargantsurprise]

/flexes celtic muscles

/does not know any cornish

... well, except 'Kernow'. BUT REGARDLESS, good luck with the exam! :>

[jellyfishywish]

I would read this and try and learn something, but it will just go into my brain and out the other end. Yes my brain has a backdoor :P.

I'll save it for later when I'm not so brain dead.
Good luck with your exam.

[rionaleonhart]

Thank you very much! I wish you luck in getting your brain's backdoor closed.

[dracothelizard]

NEEDS MOAR VIKINGS AND OLD NORSE.

Although they came after the bit where you left off. But still, YAY VIKINGS.

[rionaleonhart]

HERE ARE SOME FACTS ABOUT VIKINGS FOR YOU:

- The Viking raids were in the ninth century, around 886. The Vikings established the Danelaw, an area where Danish law prevailed, in the east of England; it later spread further west and north.
- Modern English contains about a thousand words derived from Old Norse, amongst them such common words as sky, bag and the pronouns them and they.
- Many place names in the Danelaw area show the Danish influence: endings such as -thorpe, -thwaite, -toft, -wick and -by indicate Danish settlements.
- The Danes had trouble with Old English inflectional morphology; they used it essentially randomly, and so they had a part in the deterioration of the English morphological system and the change of English from a synthetic language (one that relies on morphology to make the roles of words within a sentence clear) to an analytic language (one that relies on word order).

[dracothelizard]

And then Alfred the Great was pretty much awesome against the Vikings.

Didn't the Vikings also bring English the 'sk' sound, allowing people to differentiate between skirt and shirt?

[rionaleonhart]

Didn't the Vikings also bring English the 'sk' sound, allowing people to differentiate between skirt and shirt?

They did!

Alfred the Great was also rather important for language; he:
- encouraged literacy and writing in English,
- established a standard written English, based on his Wessex dialect, which was used across the country until the Normans came along and people stopped writing in English for a century or so,
- arranged the translation of works from Latin into English, and
- opened the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is obviously a good historical source and also important for anyone studying Old English.