Were Old Norse and Old English the same language? Colin Gurrie at Dead Language Society.
Naturally, these kinds of claims invite a healthy suspicion. Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper have a great video where they test it out, and reenact a hypothetical conversation between a speaker of Old Norse and Old English as a kind of “experimental linguistic archaeology.”
...But for us the important thing is what they concluded from this experiment, namely that two people trying to make themselves understood to each other across this linguistic divide would indeed have succeeded.
The video is an hour long, but the conversation in one dialect of Old Norse and one of Old English is only a few minutes at the beginning. Gurrie mostly gives them credit that mutual intelligibility is likely, as they claim, but qualifies it that this would depend on context and situation.
1 comment:
There's a vagueness issue at the frontiers of languages; while there are clear examples of two languages that are not the same (e.g. French versus German), there are reasonable questions about when two very similar languages are really dialects or patois or something similar.
Here's a good video you've probably seen in which a man trained in Old English goes to modern Friesland and discusses buying a cow. It's not quite the same, but they clearly understand each other just fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
We usually treat Jamaican as a patois within English, but it's at least as different in sound and vocabulary as this difference. Normally we'd say that Old English and Friesian are clearly different languages, though, being separated not only by geography but time. Old English and Old Norse were closer in both respects.
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