When the Vikings invaded Great Britain, they did more than slaughter the population, ransack the cities and scorch the earth. They also left substantial influence on the English language words like slaughter, ransack and scorch.
(46){{U}}Now, a single word in an ancient manuscript has led a U. S. linguist to conclude that the influence of the Norse on the English language may have come as much as a century earlier than most scholars had thought.{{/U}} The find came when English professor Jonathan Evans of the University of Georgia was reading a passage to his Old English class from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a Norse word, theora, jumped out at him.
The 1122 text, according to generations of scholars, was supposed to be too early to contain evidence of Danish influence on Old English. (47){{U}}But the fact that the text used the Nordic form of "their" rather than the Old English hiera or heora, suggested that Norsemen and their English hosts were not only living side-by-side in England's East Midlands but also were in "frequent, peaceful communication", Evans contends.{{/U}}
"I thought I had made a mistake," when he first saw the word, he said. "There it was, sitting there in plain sight. Nobody saw this Danish word sitting there. I kept it quiet because I thought I made a mistake."
But he was urged to investigate by a visiting Danish scholar, Hans Nielsen. (48){{U}}So Evans spent several years pursuing a hunch that a Roman Catholic monk slipped into the local dialect while copying out the ancient historical work for his monastery.{{/U}} If so, that suggests to Evans that Norse and West-Saxon dialects of Old English had mingled significantly by the 12th century if not earlier.
The result of Evans' research is a paper, recently published in the journal North-Western European Language Evolution. (49){{U}}His paper puts forth the theory that the monk's use of the Norse word is the first datable example in English of Scandinavian-derived plural pronouns, antecedents of the modern English words they, them, and their.{{/U}}
(50){{U}}" This is a footnote in a much more well-known story—the story of Scandinavian borrowings in the English language." said Evans, who can read texts in Danish, French, Old English and Old Icelandic.{{/U}} "It's going to be interesting to see how other scholars view this discovery but I think I've made my case for it."