Why Learning Old Norse > English or French

By Evan — — Writing

  • ENGLISH: See Spot. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run!

  • FRENCH: Jean est à Paris. Je voudrais un ticket de métro. Où est ma tante avec du fromage?

  • OLD NORSE: Óláfr heitir konungr. Hann á brand. Heitir brandrinn Tyrfingr. Úlf sér Óláfr ok segir: “Hér er úlfr!”. Óláfr tekr brandinn ok vegr úlfinn. En hér er ok ormr. Óláfr sér hann eigi. Óláf vegr ormrinn.

BONUS REASON: you get to study Old Norse with Lucy. English or French, not so much.

4 thoughts on “Why Learning Old Norse > English or French”

  1. Wait, Old Norse is an OVS language? Those are damned rare, these days. Most of the modern Germanics are SOV at root, with transposition to SVO in declaratives.

    For the non-linguistics-geeky, by OVS, I mean that in basic clauses, the order is Object Subject Verb. “??l??f sees a wolf,” becomes, “??lf s??r ??l??fr,” which, in terms of preserved word order, is more like, “Wolf[singular indeterminate accusative] is seen by ??l??f[nominative].” Similarly we have, “??l??f vegr ormrinn,” meaning, “??l??f[accusative] is killed by worm[singular definite nominative],” or in other words, “The worm kills ??l??f.”

    I’m wondering whether maybe this is actually an SOV, but with variable transposition for emphasis. (I know Latin has variable transposition; I forget what it is at root. I think SVO, but I can’t remember for sure.)

    PS: With an SOV language like German, if you lose the last page of a detective novel, you’ll find out who did it, who they did it to, what they did with with, and why they did it; but you never find out what they actually did!

  2. According to the theory of generative grammar (which is the dominant linguistic paradigm, and has been for decades), Lesson #1 must be mistaken; every language has an inherent order, it just may have variable transposition available. Latin has a similar property (you can scramble the words to your heart’s content), but you can figure out the inherent order from cases where stuff like preposition binding and homonyms make arbitrary order become ambiguous.

  3. Ah. Well, the Icelanders who wrote that tutorial might be naive about the linguistics, or maybe they’re just oversimplifying for their audience. They probably know that we English-speakers aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. 🙂 I do have the E.V. Gordon textbook on order — that’s been *the* canonical English/Old Norse textbook for many decades, revised multiple times. When it arrives, I’ll verify whether this is right.

    The other thought I had about this is — if you *can* freely rearrange verbs and nouns within clauses, that’s pretty exciting from a poet or singer’s perspective.

  4. Auros’ P.S. about German reminded me of this Mark Twain quotation: “A German dives into a sea of nouns and emerges on the other side with a verb in his mouth.”

Comments are closed.