Linguistic Foundations: From Viking Loanwords to Modern English Structure

The Profound Influence of Viking Loanwords

The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries.

These loanwords consist mainly of:

• A great many place names.
• Items of basic vocabulary (e.g., sky, leg).
• Words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw.

The Danelaw was the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland.

The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English because both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language. The influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound, responsible for basic vocabulary items like sky, leg, and the modern pronoun they, among hundreds of other words.

Core Concepts in Linguistic Theory

Chomskyan Principles and Innate Knowledge

One of the main Chomskyan ideas is that most language knowledge is innate and that all languages are built from a series of principles, which vary only in certain parameters (especially vocabulary). Therefore, a baby has a strong expectation about the structure of language in general and only needs to figure out the values of certain parameters for the specific language being learned.

Theories on Language Descent

Animal Explanation

Human languages are theorized to have descended from a primitive language originating from the noises of animals.

Interlingua

This concept attempts to be a common factor in all European languages, serving as a modern version of ancient Latin.

Sentence Complexity: Coordination and Subordination

Coordination is one of two main ways of making sentences more complex; the other is known as subordination, or ‘embedding’.

The essential difference is:

• In coordination, the clauses that are linked are of equal grammatical status.
• In subordination, one clause functions as part of another (the ‘main’ clause).

Affixes: Prefixes and Suffixes in English

The English language permits the addition of different, meaningful, dependent elements called affixes.

Affixes are categorized based on their position relative to the base word:

1. Prefixes

   If these elements are linked to the base at the beginning, they are called prefixes. In English, prefixes generally have a purely lexical role, allowing the construction of a large number of new words.

2. Suffixes

   If they are linked to the end of the base, they are called suffixes. Suffixes can be of two different kinds. Most of them, like prefixes, are lexical. Their main purpose is to change the idea of the base form.

   Examples of common suffixes include:

   • -ness
   • -ship
   • -dom
   • -age
   • -ery
   • -ful
   • -hood
   • -ism