OLD NORSE IN ENGLISH: The words the Vikings left behind

The Vikings raided, pillaged... and changed our language. Their Old Norse words invaded English and many remain to this day (I used one right there - watch to find out which!). In this video, discover:

⚔️ The everyday words that the Vikings gave us.
🥚 Why they stopped us confusing our eyes and our eggs.
🛡️ The Old Norse place names that are still around.
🪓 The names for people that come from Old Norse.
📅 The days of the week that we get from the Vikings.
⚧ How the Vikings are changing gender politics.

...and loads more!
#Vikings #etymology #OldNorse
===
Check me out on Twitter & TikTok:

==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Introduction
0:54 Rosetta Stone
2:09 Old Norse and Old English
3:47 Viking pronouns - gender politics (non-binary they, them, their)
4:39 Viking verbs - "are", "take", "dazzle", "crawl", "guess", "trust"
5:57 Violent words
6:22 Everyday Old Norse
6:57 Shirt and skirt
8:08 Doubling up - "egg" and "ey"
9:15 Old Norse place names
9:54 York - gates, bars and pubs
10:29 Scottish place names
11:08 Old Norse dialect words
11:53 Viking surnames
12:37 Days of the week
13:43 Goodbye

[bellabeauty]

I am a Scandinavian. A Dane. And when I learned English in school, I found it so easy because so many words in Danish, were so similar to english. Just look at the body parts. Finger is finger. Hand is hånd, Nail is negl. Hair is hår. Arm is arm. Albow is albue. Shoulder is skulder (sk). Nose is næse. Eye is øje (sounds very similar to oye). Ear is øre. Foot is fod. Toe is tå. Så there are so many words I could easily remember.

[LogaFilms]

I love “ransack”, because the Icelandic word “rannsaka” means “to investigate”. Kinda tells you how the Vikings “investigated” things

[beachboy]

I'm from Sweden. It's always funny to see a person with a thick northern english accent and see english speakers go "what?" whereas we definitly understand some of the old words they still use. We all know england has a ton of accents but it's funny when they can be so similair to another language. I've had several instances where people think i'm from the uk, for some reason

[drengskap]

As you say, 1200 years ago, the differences weren't so pronounced. Some years ago, I had an Icelandic penfriend - for those who don't know, modern Icelandic is essentially the same as Old Norse, with some words added for new inventions and ideas. Anyway, I sent my penfriend some links to pages of Old English poetry - Beowulf, The Seafarer etc, and she responded, very excited, saying, 'I can read this! To me, this looks like Icelandic with some German words included.' Now, native speakers of modern English can't get very far with Old English without taking a course in it, so that tells you something about how much English has changed over the last 1200 years, and also how little Icelandic has changed.

[notaname]

As a Scot who has several Swedish friends, I can confirm that we still have a lot of cognates, for example bairn is cognate with Swedish barn, both meaning child. We also have quine(y), which means girl in Scotland (particularly around Aberdeen), cognate with kvinna, meaning woman, moving house is known as flitting in Scotland, cognate with flytta, also meaning to move house, braw is cognate with bra, both meaning good, and greet (to cry) is cognate with gråta

[rickinielsen]

In the town in northern Jutland I grew up in, there is this tale of an elderly woman who visited her daughter in England. While the daughter and husband were at work, the old lady decided to go shopping. When later hearing about this the daughters family were impressed, because the old lady didn’t know any English. When asked how she managed, she told them that she just used a heavy northern Jutland dialect and everything was fine.

[karenbrowne]

I’m a Scot who had the great good fortune of living in Copenhagen for a couple of years and I was blown away by the strong similarity that still exists between some Scottish and Danish words 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇩🇰 Kirk/kirke- and flitting/flytning to name a few 😊

[TV-xmps]

I love that about Europe. We are so much closer in terms of culture, and therefore even languages than we usually realise.

[kaseywahl]

These etymology videos bring me an unreasonable amount of joy.

[margreetanceaux]

You make me remember a dear friend, who was living in Friesland (one of the provinces of the Netherlands). Fries (Frisian) is the second official language of the Netherlands, but Dutch is the first.
In school we learned both English and German, so my friend was fluent in three languages, and got by in a fourth.
Then he went to Sweden, and discovered he could understand most of what was going on. He found himself on the crossroads of all these Germanic languages, with Fries being an in-between to their main branches.

[fianorian]

I live in East Yorkshire and used to know an older man who often had occasion to work in Scandinavia. HIs family had been farmers for generations, so he was deeply immersed in the East Yorkshire dialect, which wass heavily influenced by the Vikings. He once told me that he and his Scandinavian co-workers could often understand each other without either of them learning the language. I don't know how true this was, but I could see it happening.

[tynesidesteelerectors]

I'm a born and bred Geordie and am aware a lot of Geordie slang words are old Norse words. I now reside in Canada and was asked by a lady in a grocery store if my wife and I were vikings. I have not lost my accent in 20 years but a lot of Canadians do struggle with my accent.

[CannedMan]

Correction (which I should have written much earlier): It seems the meaning I have been most familiar with, is an in-group usage, a further development of the meaning ‘desire’ > ‘desire for good’ > ‘love, care’. My previous statement thus would not match the common meaning of _hug._
My favourite English Viking word is _hug_ which still means _love_ in Norwegian (we also have _hugleik, _ the _-leik_ part being a suffix which creates abstract nouns). So the English word for a warm embrace, a hug, is the Norse word for love.

[AbWischBar]

As someone who speaks, German, English, Swedish and Danish, this will be one of my favorits in your series. I just paused so many times to guess or find the origin before you revealed it.

One of my favorite ones is "window", which in Danish is still "vindue". The Swedes and Germans however went latin and adapted "fenestra" making it "Fenster" in German and "fönster" in Swedish.

And one of my favorite enlightenments when I came to Scandinavia was to find the origin of the German "vergammelt" (rotten), since "gammel" means "old" in Danish and Swedish. So something that is rotten is simply "too old" (ver-gammelt).

[jakobfredriksson]

Fun fact:

Here In Sweden, people quite often grammatically struggle with 'they' (swe: 'de') and 'them' (swe: 'dem').
This probably because we've ditched the differences in spoken Swedish (we always say 'dom') but still
use 'de' and 'dem' in text.

However, when Swedes with this problem are told to silently translate the sentence they're about to write
into English first, they tend to nail the differences. Circle of life...

Cool fact: *Edit: Saw down the comments this one already was mentioned.*

The English word for 'window' derives from 'vindöga' where 'vind' = "wind" and öga = 'eye'; as in an eye
(on your wall) where the wind can pass through.

[bigdallyc]

I'm attempting to learn German, and this channel has been immensely integral to keeping me interested. It's so helpful to examine Old English, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. Love this channel!

[tovekauppi]

Fun fact: in modern Swedish, the words for “they” and “them” are mostly pronounced the same way but spelled differently. Because of this, school kids are having lots of trouble knowing what word to use in a text. One of the tips teachers will tell students is to translate to English. If it would be “they” in English, it’s “de” in Swedish. If it’s “them” in English it’s “dem”. It is becoming more and more accepted to spell both words “dom” instead as that’s how they are pronounced, but it does come across as pretty informal.

[LostsTVandRadio]

There are so many commonalities between Swedish and English even today. I love the signs in Sweden that say Plocka Upp Efter Din Hund - ie Pluck Up After Thine Hound.

[karolw.]

I follow your excellent and succinct stories from Ontario, Canada. Thanks to the settlers from the British Isles who came here 200 or so years ago, we have lots of Viking placenames in my area: Whitby, Grimsby, Burnhamthorpe and so on. I guess they did not think they were bringing a bit of Danelaw with them.

[williba]

When the Duke of Northumberland visited Iceland and Greenland some of his staff who spoke with a Northumbrian dialect could converse with the locals. Geordies language includes Gannin in (In Gannin, entrance) Gannin oot (Oot ganin exit) |Yem, (Home) etc.