A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 | Page 8

In spite of the resistance of the English, the Danes had, before the end of the ninth century, succeeded in obtaining a permanent footing in England; and, in the eleventh century, a Danish dynasty sat upon the English throne from the year 1016 to 1042. From the time of King Alfred, the Danes of the Danelagh were a settled part of the population of England; and hence we find, especially on the east coast, a large number of Danish names still in use.
11. +Character of the Scandinavian Element.+-- The Northmen, as we have said, were Teutons; and they spoke a dialect of the great Teutonic (or German) language. The sounds of the Danish dialect-- or language, as it must now be called-- are harder than those of the German. We find a +k+ instead of a +ch+; a +p+ preferred to an +f+. The same is the case in Scotland, where the hard form +kirk+ is preferred to the softer +church+. Where the Germans say +Dorf+-- our English word +Thorpe+, a village-- the Danes say +Drup+.
12. +Scandinavian Words+ (i).-- The words contributed to our language by the Scandinavians are of two kinds: (i) Names of places; and (ii) ordinary words. (i) The most striking instance of a Danish place-name is the noun +by+, a town. Mr Isaac Taylor[2] tells us that there are in the east of England more than six hundred names of towns ending in +by+. Almost all of these are found in the Danelagh, within the limits of the great highway made by the Romans to the north-west, and well-known as +Watling Street+. We find, for example, +Whitby+, or the town on the white cliffs; +Grimsby+, or the town of Grim, a great sea-rover, who obtained for his countrymen the right that all ships from the Baltic should come into the port of Grimsby free of duty; +Tenby+, that is +Daneby+; +by-law+, a law for a special town; and a vast number of others. The following Danish words also exist in our times-- either as separate and individual words, or in composition-- +beck+, a stream; +fell+, a hill or table-land; +firth+ or +fiord+, an arm of the sea-- the same as the Danish fiord; +force+, a waterfall; +garth+, a yard or enclosure; +holm+, an island in a river; +kirk+, a church; +oe+, an island; +thorpe+, a village; +thwaite+, a forest clearing; and +vik+ or +wick+, a station for ships, or a creek.
[Footnote 2: Words and Places, p. 158.]
13. +Scandinavian Words+ (ii).-- The most useful and the most frequently employed word that we have received from the Danes is the word +are+. The pure English word for this is +beoth+ or +sindon+. The Danes gave us also the habit of using +to+ before an infinitive. Their word for +to+ was +at+; and +at+ still survives and is in use in Lincolnshire. We find also the following Danish words in our language: +blunt+, +bole+ (of a tree), +bound+ (on a journey-- properly +boun+), +busk+ (to dress), +cake+, +call+, +crop+ (to cut), +curl+, +cut+, +dairy+, +daze+, +din+, +droop+, +fellow+, +flit+, +for+, +froward+, +hustings+, +ill+, +irk+, +kid+, +kindle+, +loft+, +odd+, +plough+, +root+, +scold+, +sky+, +tarn+ (a small mountain lake), +weak+, and +ugly+. It is in Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lincoln, Norfolk, and even in the western counties of Cumberland and Lancashire, that we find the largest admixture of Scandinavian words.
14. +Influence of the Scandinavian Element.+-- The introduction of the Danes and the Danish language into England had the result, in the east, of unsettling the inflexions of our language, and thus of preparing the way for their complete disappearance. The declensions of nouns became unsettled; nouns that used to make their plural in +a+ or in +u+ took the more striking plural suffix +as+ that belonged to a quite different declension. The same things happened to adjectives, verbs, and other parts of language. The causes of this are not far to seek. Spoken language can never be so accurate as written language; the mass of the English and Danes never cared or could care much for grammar; and both parties to a conversation would of course hold firmly to the +root+ of the word, which was intelligible to both of them, and let the inflexions slide, or take care of themselves. The more the English and Danes mixed with each other, the oftener they met at church, at games, and in the market-place, the more rapidly would this process of stripping go on,-- the smaller care would both peoples take of the grammatical inflexions which they had brought with them into this country.
15. +The Latin Element in English.+-- So far as the number of words-- the vocabulary-- of the language is concerned, the Latin contribution is by far the most important element in our language. Latin was the language of the Romans;