Vikings likely helped make English slightly less annoying (1 Viewer)

[Ahsoka]

English is one of the few European languages that has no grammatical gender. One of the reasons thought for this is the Viking settlement of parts of Great Britain brought Old English and Old Norse in close contact as the groups intermingled. Both languages had masculine, feminine, and neuter for their grammatical genders. Given that grammatical gender is arbitrary and not shared between languages, this likely caused some difficulties as they tried to acclimate to the grammatical genders for each others languages. Ultimately, this likely helped English ultimately lose grammatical gender completely.

 

[Ahsoka]

Language taglist:
@athenaaa @Lexie @Dreamer_of_Songs @Nina @velvet @MyLovelyLove @alo @eclipsoul @Villains @Moguri @uran @Chiara @Snailmin @EweChanDoThis @Sooyaabean @Chohee_nyang @snsd2beg @FaSHiON_red

 

[dark_tranquility]

old norse
Does iceland still use it?

 

[Ahsoka]

old norse
Does iceland still use it?

They don’t, they use modern Icelandic. The two languages are super similar though, particularly with writing, so many Icelandic speakers can read old Norse pretty well

 

[dark_tranquility]

They don’t, they use modern Icelandic. The two languages are super similar though, particularly with writing, so many Icelandic speakers can read old Norse pretty well

fair
It sounds pretty off the tongue

 

[ChiaraStar169]

another late night fact - nice!

 

[HugeBakkaeMotae]

 

[Chohee_nyang]

Wow, Even Korean does not have grammatical genders

 

[Moguri]

and I just thought it never had it

 

[Ahsoka]

Wow, Even Korean does not have grammatical genders

Most languages don’t, but in Indo European languages it’s very common Especially in Europe

 

[TrinityJade]

Thank you vikings!

 

[snsd2beg]

I knew about this one
Thank you Vikings

 

[eclipsoul]

and we thank them for that

 

[Chohee_nyang]

Most languages don’t, but in Indo European languages it’s very common Especially in Europe

Interesting never heard of that tho

 

[Ahsoka]

Interesting never heard of that tho

To have honest, when thinking of all the major Indo European languages from Europe, English is the only clear example (though you could count Armenian too). All the others (French, Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek, Swedish, Italian, etc) have some form of a grammatical gender system. Though there are some Indo European languages from Asia that don’t.