The scandinavian trace in the english language

At the meeting of such competing versions of the word, their mixing could occur. In such cases it is impossible to say exactly what happened: the displacement of the English word by the Scandinavian or the change in the phonetic composition of the English word under the influence of its Scandinavian correspondence. In fact, these two phenomena become indistinguishable here. For example, the verb to give ‘давать’ in OE wasȝiefan (withpalatalȝ); in Scandinavian it corresponds with the verb gefa (withsoundbacklingual g).Chaucer, at the end of the X IV century, also used a version of yiven, yeven with palatal y, which undoubtedly dates back directly to the Old English ȝiefan. However, later, from the beginning of XV century, in English rooted theversion of give with a backlingual g. This backlingual g could not be the result of phonetic development from palatal ȝ. Thus, his only source of this word could only be a Scandinavian variant. It can be assumed that the old English version was replaced by the Scandinavian one or that it underwent phonetic changes under the influence of the Scandinavian language. As we have seen, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between these two possibilities. The same phenomenon affected the verb ‘to receive’, etc. ȝietan, Skand. geta: from the XIV century the form gete rooted in the English language. We can say that the general tendency to backlingual articulation, common to the Scandinavian, in contrast to the old English, penetrated into the English language. At the same time, in a number of other words that began in the old English language with palatal ȝ-, it has survived in English to the present time. For example, from the Old English verb ȝieldan ‘pay’ appeared theMiddle English yelden and new English yield ‘yield’, ‘give’; from the old English ȝiernan ‘to desire’ — middle English yernen, new Englishyearn.Similar was the development of the word ‘sister’. In Old English this word existed in the form sweostor, later swustor from which developed the Middle English form suster, which we find in Chaucer's works. It was subsequently displaced or was influenced by the Scandinavian form of systir. Since the XV century,the form sister was used in English texts used (with the replacement of sound [ü] by the sound [i]).Thus, in some cases the Scandinavian variants penetrated into the English literary language relatively late. In the Northern dialects of the English language, of course, they existed before. Therefore, it is possible to present this process in such a way that by the time of their penetration into the literary language, these were no longer Scandinavian words in a strict sense, butdialectisms, i.e. the words common to the Northern, English dialects[3, p. 186].ConclusionsThe struggle of the English against the Scandinavians lasted over 300 years and during this period more than half of England was occupied by the invaders. The new settlers and the Englishmen assimilated. Their settlements were quite close one to another and they didn’t differ either in social rank or in the level of culture and customs. The Scandinavian dialects, spoken by the conquerors, belonged to the group of Northern Germanic languages and in their phonetic and grammatical structure stood quite close to the old English language. These dialects differed in the same basic grammatical categories: strong and weak declension of nouns, with the division of the strong one into several types (according to the vowel sound of the base), strong and weak declension of adjectives, with the same delimitation of their syntactic functions as in the old English language, seven classes of strong and three classes of weak verbs.Close relationship of English dialects with Scandinavian ones made mutual understanding without translation quite possible. On the other hand, the massive settlement of Scandinavians in the North and East of England provided the great influence of their language in these areas. The relationship between the two languages corresponded to the relationship between the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians; both languages existed in the same social strata and were equal. The result of this situation was a mixture of Scandinavian dialects with English, and this process was particularly intense in the North and East.The presence of the Scandinavians in the English population is indicated by a large number of place-names in the northern and eastern areas.The major semantic spheres of Scandinavian borrowings pertain to everyday life and do not differ from native words.ReferencesАнтрушина Г. Б. Лексикология английского языка: Учеб.пособие для студентов /Антрушина Г. Б., Афанасьева О. В., Морозова Н. Н. — М.: Дрофа, 1999. – 288 с.Дубенец Э. М. Лексикология современного английского языка: лекции и семинары. 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