Did the old English language die out rather than change?

I am no linguist and do not know Old Norse, but this article has some interesting points: http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-scandinavian.html

It argues that modern English developed from Old Norse, not from Old English. One thing it does not take up is the fact that the definite article in modern Scandinavian is placed at the end of the noun, but as far as I understand, in Old Norse it was possible to place the definite article either at the end of the noun or before the noun. One question comes up if their argument is correct: Why did the areas that were never conquered by the Vikings change language?
 
No, that argument has been raised a few times and is widely dismissed by the linguistic consensus. The most fundamental base of historical linguistics is phonological correspondence. And for a few examples:
  • Old English had initial w- for many words. Modern English has initial w- in the same words. Old Norse had no initial w- in these words. Example: OE wull; ME wool; ON ull. OE wulf; ME wolf; ON ulfr. For both cases, compare Old High German wolla for "wool" and wolf for "wolf."
  • Old Germanic *-nþ- lost the nasal in Old English and Modern English, but became -nn- in Norse. Example: OE ōðer; ME other; ON annarr.
  • Old English words with -f- in them often have -v- in Modern English instead. These words usually feature -ft- in Old Norse, and -ft- > -v- is a lot harder to explain than -f- > -v-. Example: OE ǣfnung; ME evening; ON aptann.
Phonologically ME is clearly a descendant of OE.

For a more specific discussion of the points the article raises:

  • "Like most colonists, the Scandinavian-speaking inhabitants found no reason to switch to the language of the country they had arrived in."
Last I checked, people in London weren't saying bonjou! and cha va' ti? to each other so this seems like a questionable claim to make, to say the least.

  • "What is particularly interesting is that Old English adopted words for day-to-day things that were already in the language. Usually one borrows words and concepts for new things. In English almost the reverse is true – the day-to-day words are Scandinavian, and there are many of them."
Koreans usually use Chinese loanwords to refer to all numbers above fifty. Modern Korean words for concepts as common as "river," "mountain," "wind," "brush," "rabbit," "friend," "lake," and "world" all derive from Chinese. Korean is not, in fact, a Chinese language.

Or for a more Western example, the French words for "white," "blue," "dance," "fresh," "war," and "garden" all come from Old Frankish. (French blanc is cognate to English blank, bleu to blue, frais to fresh, guerre to war, jardin to garden.) This has not made French a Germanic language.

  • "Even though a massive number of new words are on their way into a language, it nevertheless retains its own grammar. This is almost a universal law."
Here's a paradox. According to scholarly consensus, Old English clearly borrowed grammatical features from North Germanic. But if Modern English is actually a North Germanic language as the authors claim, it must have borrowed its West Germanic grammatical features from Old English! So the conclusion that grammatical borrowing happened is inescapable, no matter whether English is North or West Germanic.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
Excellent summary of why this is wrong from Intransigent Southerner.

The problem Faarlund seems to be labouring under (and as a trained linguist, he really shouldn't be) is that languages descend lineally from one another in a neat tree. In actual fact they are more like streams of dye in flowing water, mixing together where they touch to create new colours which show the proportional influence of the shades that formed them. And the idea that languages don't borrow grammar form each other went out with the ark. They do, a lot.

Something very complicated happened in the transition from Old English to Middle English, which we don't fully understand, but seems to have involved the interaction of Old English, Norse and probably either a Brittonic language or a variety of Old English strongly influenced by Brittonic. Of course, Norse was incredibly important in this mix, but all the basic function words come from Old English, except for the pronouns "they/them" which are Scandinavian.

The reorganisation of English into a fairly strict subject/verb/object language, which Faarlund identifies as Scandnavian, actually stems from the break down of the Old English and Norse case and verbal conjugation system during this period, which probably owes more to Welsh (Brittonic) influence than anything else. Originally, both English and Norse nouns were inflected so you knew which was the subject and which was the object from the ending of the noun, when the two mixed with this "Brittonicised Old English" the endings were lost, as Brittonic nouns were already completely unmarked for case by about 500AD. When you lose case endings and verbal inflections for person, you really need strict word order to tell you what is the subject and what is the object.
 
For an excellent treatment of this topic:
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

The short version: Modern English is a pidgin language.
Starting with the Saxons and the Britons, then the Norse and the Saxons, lastly the Normans and the Saxons. Invaders come in and mix with the natives.
The conquerors use a simplified form of the native language mixed with their own words. This lets adults learn the language.
 
For an excellent treatment of this topic:
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Magnificent-Bastard-Tongue-History/dp/1592404944

The short version: Modern English is a pidgin language.
Starting with the Saxons and the Britons, then the Norse and the Saxons, lastly the Normans and the Saxons. Invaders come in and mix with the natives.
The conquerors use a simplified form of the native language mixed with their own words. This lets adults learn the language.

"Pidgin" is too strong a word. It is true, however, that English as we know is fairly mixed. The tendency to simplify the inflection system was already there (and it operated to a varying extent in other Germanic languages that underwent less mixing; a similar trend can be seen in most Romance) but linguistic mixings probably operated more in England to intensify that.
 
"Pidgin" is too strong a word. It is true, however, that English as we know is fairly mixed. The tendency to simplify the inflection system was already there (and it operated to a varying extent in other Germanic languages that underwent less mixing; a similar trend can be seen in most Romance) but linguistic mixings probably operated more in England to intensify that.

If Wikipedias is to be trusted a pidgin language is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. This seems to apply to English (as well as the modern Scandinavian languages, which have been heavily influenced by Low German).
 
If Wikipedias is to be trusted a pidgin language is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. This seems to apply to English (as well as the modern Scandinavian languages, which have been heavily influenced by Low German).

Um, in the link you posted, the second paragraph spells out that "not all simplified or 'broken' languages are pidgins"; furthermore, it gets muddied by the fact that English and Scandinavian languages are part of the same overall language family, and thus do have elements in common. A better example of a pidgin would be if a dialect comprising elements of both Norse (North Germanic) and Gaelic (Goidelic Celtic) were to arise in Ireland or Scotland, while simultaneously being non-intelligible with either one "donating" language.
 
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The Danes and the Anglo-Saxon lived before the Anglo-Saxon migration as neighbour to each other. After the migrations the remnant of the Jutes and Angles conquered by the Danes, and their languages ended being seen as dialects of Danish. So the Danes and Anglo-Saxon likely had a very large mutual intelligibility at the point of the Danish invasions. Which is what this discussion a little meaningless. We're dealing with people who fundamental at the time spoke the same language, in fact most Germanic speakers was likely able to understand each other at this point in time.
 
Um, in the link you posted, the second paragraph spells out that "not all simplified or 'broken' languages are pidgins"; furthermore, it gets muddied by the fact that English and Scandinavian languages are part of the same overall language family, and thus do have elements in common. A better example of a pidgin would be if a dialect comprising elements of both Norse (North Germanic) and Gaelic (Goidelic Celtic) were to arise, while simultaneously being non-intelligible with either one "donating" language.

In general, Pidgins are really not "mixed" languages (while English is, to a point). Archetypal pidgins like Tok Pisin tend, like creoles (with which they have a lot in common, though they are not entirely the same thing) to take most of the lexicon from a single language (the "lexifier") while reducing morphology and simplifying syntax to a minimum. They may and do incorporate grammatical and lexical elements from sources other than the lexifier and they gradually restructure the whole thing varyingly. But something that creoles and pidgins have in common is the collapse, or near collapse, of the earlier gramatical structure, something that English clearly did not experience. While the end result may resemble a pidgin to some extent, the evolution of English as documented shows a very different path, one of gradual transition toward a more analytic system in general (still ongoing btw in most varieties). It is reasonable to argue that extensive contact with Old Norse and Norman Romance, both somewhat more analytic than Old English was, catalyzed this transition, but its seeds appear to have been already in place in Old English itself (the tendency is at work at varying paces in most Germanic languages anyway, showing to varying degrees in the descendants of Norse, in Frisian, in Dutch, and to a lesser extent in German; Afrikaans shows that more, for precisely the same reasons English does). You may notice a similar general trend in Romance, often more pronounced in French than elsewhere. I don't know enough of the Celtic languages to say much useful, but I am under the impression that it is often the case there as well.
(Persian underwent massive grammatical simplification and restructuring as well, with a final end result that resembles English in many structural aspects; this was likewise accellerated a lot by extensive contact with Arabic - and other languages, notably Turkic - and interestingly many vernacular Iranic varieties, such as the Kurdish languages and Pashto, tend to be more conservative than the traditional Persian written norm - but still, the reduced morphology is clearly a pre-Islamic trend).
 
In general, Pidgins are really not "mixed" languages (while English is, to a point). Archetypal pidgins like Tok Pisin tend, like creoles (with which they have a lot in common, though they are not entirely the same thing) to take most of the lexicon from a single language (the "lexifier") while reducing morphology and simplifying syntax to a minimum. They may and do incorporate grammatical and lexical elements from sources other than the lexifier and they gradually restructure the whole thing varyingly. But something that creoles and pidgins have in common is the collapse, or near collapse, of the earlier gramatical structure, something that English clearly did not experience. While the end result may resemble a pidgin to some extent, the evolution of English as documented shows a very different path, one of gradual transition toward a more analytic system in general (still ongoing btw in most varieties). It is reasonable to argue that extensive contact with Old Norse and Norman Romance, both somewhat more analytic than Old English was, catalyzed this transition, but its seeds appear to have been already in place in Old English itself (the tendency is at work at varying paces in most Germanic languages anyway, showing to varying degrees in the descendants of Norse, in Frisian, in Dutch, and to a lesser extent in German; Afrikaans shows that more, for precisely the same reasons English does). You may notice a similar general trend in Romance, often more pronounced in French than elsewhere. I don't know enough of the Celtic languages to say much useful, but I am under the impression that it is often the case there as well.
(Persian underwent massive grammatical simplification and restructuring as well, with a final end result that resembles English in many structural aspects; this was likewise accellerated a lot by extensive contact with Arabic - and other languages, notably Turkic - and interestingly many vernacular Iranic varieties, such as the Kurdish languages and Pashto, tend to be more conservative than the traditional Persian written norm - but still, the reduced morphology is clearly a pre-Islamic trend).

I...completely agree with all of that. Did I give the impression I wasn't, or are you just elaborating for board edification? Either way, well said!

Pidgin and creole languages give the impression of a haphazard linguistic collision, rather unlike English and other languages which show a progressive transitional trend towards simplicity that (along with borrowed vocabulary) could be misconstrued as such.
 
I...completely agree with all of that. Did I give the impression I wasn't, or are you just elaborating for board edification? Either way, well said!

Pidgin and creole languages give the impression of a haphazard linguistic collision, rather unlike English and other languages which show a progressive transitional trend towards simplicity that (along with borrowed vocabulary) could be misconstrued as such.
I was essentially expanding on what you said.
 
On Persian, I would add that the more conservative varieties I mentioned above are fairly distantly related to Standard Persian - most probably diverged before Cuneiform Old Persian was ever put into written form, which is about the age we can reconstruct early Proto-Germanic as a (somehwat) unitary phase.
Of course, considering the extent of the areas involved, the complexity of attested linguistic phaenomena, and the time depth, there is no chance of fully uniform varieties neatly and simply branching off ever having happened in either Germanic or Iranian, or any other language family with a similar geographical extent, though there are mitigating factors - "standard" variants used for longer range contact, archaic poetic/religious registers (clearly a thing in many contexts, notably Indo-European and Semitic but also many others though often more sparsely documented), political hegemonies standardizing things to some extent, and, in some cases, written norms, though the latter of very limited diffusion until very recent times. The latter three factors (and others) may be summarized as "prestige", but it is usually much more complicated than that.
 
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