The day I took my mask off my face was missing
December 10, 2012 § Leave a comment
A recent article in Science Daily has the headline ‘Linguist makes sensational claim: English is a Scandinavian language’. The claim in question is Jan Terje Faarlund’s conclusion that ‘English is in reality a Scandinavian language’ — that ‘Old English quite simply died out while Scandinavian survived, albeit strongly influenced of course by Old English.’ The core of Faarlund’s argument is that, in addition to many words that originally belonged to Norwegian and/or Danish, English has syntactic structures that are Scandinavian rather than West Germanic in origin. Specifically, Faarlund argues that ‘wherever English differs syntactically from the other Western Germanic languages — German, Dutch, Frisian — it has the same structure as the Scandinavian languages.’ Faarlund then gives a few examples of syntactic parallelism between English and Scandinavian [that is, the Germanic languages of Scandinavia] and concludes that ‘the only reasonable explanation’ for this parallelism ‘is that English is in fact a Scandinavian language, and a continuation of the Norwegian-Danish language which was used in England during the Middle Ages.’
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the saying goes. read more
ART: Marlo Pascual
my nerves are bad to-night 
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