Secrets of the Words You Know
Blog 5 English as a Germanic Language 2: Old Norse and the secrets of ‘sk’
First, answers to the questions in Blog 4.
Q1. The ten words from Old Norse are : ‘troll’, ‘ransack’, ‘take’, ‘get’, ‘law’, ‘egg’, ‘happy’, ‘loose’, ‘them’ and ‘sky’. The two German ones, ‘zeitgeist’ and ‘schadenfreude’ show their origin very clearly as quite recent borrowings; the two Dutch ones are each quite specific, a ‘scone’ being a particular kind of baked product, and ‘yacht’ a particular sailing vessel.
Q2. Yes, it’s no surprise that ‘troll’ and ‘ransack’ come from Viking territory, but most of the other words feel a very integral part of the language. It’s particularly noteworthy that they include a pronoun (‘them’: also, not on the list, ‘they’ and ‘their’) and generic verbs (‘take’ and ‘get’: we could have also included, for example, ‘give’).
Q3. The two items of clothing are, of course, ‘shirt’ and ‘skirt’.
Q4. ‘Shirt’ is inherited and ‘skirt’ is a borrowing from Old Norse. What secret of the two words enables us to be confident of this?
In the very first blog, in discussing ‘f’/’p’ matches, we talked about ‘lip-sounds’ (‘Labials’ – see Technical Note 1) and ‘tip-of-the-tongue sounds’ (‘Dentals’). There are also sounds which are articulated between the blade, rather than the tip, of the tongue and various points on your palate at the roof or the back of the mouth: the ‘Palatals’ and ‘Velars’ listed in Technical Note 1.
To get a sense of the variety of points of articulation for palatals and velars, feel how your tongue moves forward between the following words ‘car’, ‘key’, ‘cube’, ‘chew’, ‘shoe’, ‘sue’.
Over time, it is not uncommon for languages to undergo a forward movement of articulation from the back of the mouth, particularly (but not exclusively, as we are about to see) before vowels where the tongue is more forward in the mouth, the ‘front vowels’ ‘i’ and ‘e’ as opposed to the ‘back vowels’ like ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘u’ (in ‘sue’ above, there is a clear ‘i-sound’ before the ‘oo’ sound). We will call this forward movement ‘fronting’. [The academic term is ‘palatalization’ but who wants a six-syllable word if two will do?]
In Old English, a wide-ranging fronting of velar stop consonants took place in the period after the Anglo-Saxon settlement, including for the combination ‘sk’, which evolved to ‘sh’. in this case, rather unusually, the shift took place before all vowels. It follows – here is the secret behind ‘skirt’ and ‘shirt’ – that NO English words beginning with ‘sk’ or ‘sc’ have been inherited directly from the original Proto-Indo-European. So ‘sky’, ‘scone’ and ‘skirt’ cannot be inherited English words: as we already know, the first and third in fact came from Old Norse, and the second (much later) from Dutch. Both these Germanic languages kept the original ‘*sk’, though the spellings and precise pronunciations of this combination in the modern languages are not identical.
We will discuss what happened to inherited ‘k’ and ‘g’ in later blogs, but for now let us look for doublets between English inherited words beginning with ‘sh’ and English borrowings from Old Norse beginning with ‘sk’. See if you can fill in the blanks in the following table.
Borrowings from Old Norse with the sound ‘sk’ ( (In the missing words, this is spelt ‘sc’-)
shave
–
shear (‘cut’ as in ‘shear sheep’)
– (clue: think of an ‘sh-’ word with skull-like thinness and protective uses)
– (clue: might be the end-result of a shaving accident!)
screech
–
scalp
Answers in the next blog.
This week, you will also get a link to a second Technical Note, this time on the main principles of sound changes.