There is actually quite a debate around this now. Modern english is much closer to "scandinavian" than old english in sentence construction, so the new thesis is that old english words were adopted by the norse rulers into the norse/scandinavian language.
It has later been "perverted" by the french ;)
However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.
> However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.
Also, most linguists who are experts in the history of English (Faarlund is an expert on Norse, not English) tend to border on the dismissive when considering Faarlund's theory of English as Norse dialect.
Sounds strange to me that Danish rulers would import back sentence construction with such gusto all the way back to eastern Sweden? Is it not more likely the Danish sentence construction filtered down into common English with time?
I am a bit stuffed today due to a cold, what I tried to explain is that there is no "Old English" in modern english. It was wiped out during danelaw and replaced with scandinavian. They did however adopt local "Old English" words into scandinavian and eventually it evolved to modern english.
Scandinavian languages did not change due to this.
Read the article, they explain it much better than me ;)
It has later been "perverted" by the french ;)
However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121127094111.h...