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Words of Old Norse origin have entered the English language, primarily from the contact between Old Norse and Old English during colonisation of eastern and northern England between the mid 9th to the 11th centuries (see also Danelaw).
The world known to the Norse. The Norse people traveled abroad as Vikings and Varangians. As such, they often named the locations and peoples they visited with Old Norse words unrelated to the local endonyms. Some of these names have been acquired from sagas, runestones or Byzantine chronicles.
A kenning (Old English kenning [cʰɛnːiŋɡ], Modern Icelandic [cʰɛnːiŋk]) is a circumlocution, an ambiguous or roundabout figure of speech, used instead of an ordinary noun in Old Norse, Old English, and later Icelandic poetry. This list is not intended to be comprehensive. Kennings for a particular character are listed in that character ...
List Name (Old Norse) Name (anglicized) Meaning Sources ... The root svaf-is an Indo-European cognate to words meaning sleep (Greek hypnos; Latin sopor, sopio, somnus ...
Old Norse has three categories of verbs (strong, weak, & present-preterite) and two categories of nouns (strong, weak). Conjugation and declension are carried out by a mix of inflection and two nonconcatenative morphological processes: umlaut, a backness-based alteration to the root vowel; and ablaut, a replacement of the root vowel, in verbs.
The Proto-Norse language developed into Old Norse by the 8th century, and Old Norse began to develop into the modern North Germanic languages in the mid- to late 14th century, ending the language phase known as Old Norse. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century.
The extant sources for Norse mythology, particularly the Prose and Poetic Eddas, contain many names of jötnar and gýgjar (often glossed as giants and giantesses respectively).
One such difference is the insertion of u before r, when it is preceded by a consonant at the end of the word. Thus the Old Norse name Baldr comes out as Baldur in modern Icelandic. Other differences include vowel-shifts, whereby Old Norse ǫ became Icelandic ö, and Old Norse œ (oe ligature) became Icelandic æ (ae ligature).