Customer Reviews

The Scandinavian Languages: Introduction to Their History (The great languages)

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In the middle third or so of the 20th century, Faber and Faber published a splendid series called "The Great Languages" which consisted of rigorous but entertaining introductions to a number of languages from a diachronic perspective. Regrettably, the books were rarely distributed on the other side of the Atlantic, and fell swiftly out of print. While not the finest example of the series, Einar Haugen's THE SCANDINAVIAN LANGUAGES is a good introduction to the languages of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as well as Iceland and the Faroe Islands.

Haugen's presentation is diachronic throughout, but this is no ordinary listing of findings based on dry Neogrammarian methods. The author was a fan of considering language as a matter of sociology, and much of the book is about how exactly the languages were used, in the form of what we can guess from archaeology, runic monuments, and ultimately the contentious rise of the standard languages. The matter of the runic period takes up a large portion of the book, and it was fascinating for me to read about these earliest "literary" attempts of the Nordic peoples.

But in spite of the author's interest in the history of the people who spoke the language in its various stages, there is some rigorous presentation of historical phonology and lexicon here. The sound changes that turned proto-NW Germanic into Proto-Scandinavian, Common Scandinavia, and some of the early independent languages are sketched out. I knew that in spite of some mutual intelligibility there were differences between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, and now I know something about the different modern word stock of each language.

One thing I was not happy about was the organization and typesetting of the book. It uses the same general layout as the other volumes in this Faber & Faber series, but the way Haugen chose to structure his book doesn't jive with it at all. Also, the translation of selected words or sentences is not placed in quotation marks as usual, which makes it hard to see where the translation ends and the regular flow of text begins. Also, the work is generally more dated than other volumes since its coverage of the language reaches the period in which it was written; Augen's observations on the effect of English on the Scandinavian languages is noticeably in need of updating and expansion now.

Nonetheless, Augen's book is a generally entertaining and informative work, and well worth reading for those with prior training in historical linguistics who would like a spotlight on these languages of northern Europe.