In the northwest corner of Europe, one often encounters folk who speak MUGGLE tongues: languages, such as Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, that employ Mostly Untaught Germanic Grammars that Lean towards English.
These vernaculars took their present form in much the same way as the speech of the Bard of Avon. Medieval dialects smashed into each other, breaking the little distinctions that had previously done most of the heavy grammatical lifting. As a result, people adopted the custom of using word order, rather than suffixes, to explain who was doing what to whom.
In the Viking Age, for example, the suffix -ur (which indicated the subject of a sentence) allowed one to describe the equine dinner of an untamed canine in two ways. That is, one could either say úlfur át hest (‘a wolf ate a horse’) or hest át úlfur (“horse, ate a wolf”).1 If, however, one moved -ur to the other noun in the sentence, the meaning of the whole would change considerably, giving us (the much less probable) hestur át ulf (‘a horse ate a wolf’) or ulf át hestur (‘wolf, a horse ate’).
Thanks, however, to the aforementioned collisions, this feature, much beloved of poets, went the way of the longship. Thus, we ended up with the following sentences, each of which depends upon assigned seating to convey meaning.2
The fact of these parallel developments does a great favor to persons of the Anglophone persuasion who wish to learn one (or more) of the MUGGLE vernaculars. Unfortunately, in the course of sorting out the results of the aforementioned collisions, those languages acquired a feature that speakers of English are sure to find confusing.
In days of yore, the ancestors of the MUGGLE tongues employed three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. In many instances, these features of words accorded with nature. Thus, in Old Norse, a ram (hrútur) was masculine, a ewe (ær) feminine, and a lamb (lamb) neuter. (‘Lamb’, by the way, has managed to wind its way through many Germanic languages without many changes to its spelling or its sound. So, wherever you find yourself in the MUGGLE world, don’t be … wait for it … sheepish about using it.)
About five hundred years ago, the MUGGLE masculine and the MUGGLE feminine merged, thereby creating the category of ‘common’. In other words, when it comes to sex, MUGGLE words are either ‘neither’ or ‘both’.
Consider, if you will, the case of three sheep. In English, we would describe the members of this little family as ‘the ram, the ewe, and the lamb’.’ Our cousins from the Netherlands, however, would call them ‘de ram, de ooi en het lam’. That is, while the mamma and the papa take the common de, the baby employs the neuter het.
I have refrained from offering parallel phrases from the Scandinavian languages. I do this because they are complicated by the practice of putting the ‘the’ at the end of words. (I will explain this feature, known as the ‘post-positive definite article’, in the next post in this series.)
To be continued …
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Pace Jackson Crawford. I love the work you do, but, in honor of my more recent ancestors, I’m going with the modern Icelandic spelling.
Please note that, in making the table, I preferred cognates (words with common ancestors) to the words most commonly used. Thus, for example, Danish and Norwegian wolves are more likely to ‘dine’ (spise) than ‘eat’ (æde, ete).
When I was learning to speak Dutch (& then Flemish) the big distinguishing factor from English seemed to be the lack of French influence. I liked this a lot since I could talk me some German but not much French! the newer Dutch words seemed to have the French influence
I R Muggle