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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).
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 ...
From skrækja, meaning "bawl, shout, or yell" [29] or from skrá, meaning "dried skin", in reference to the animal pelts worn by the Inuit. [29] The name the Norse Greenlanders gave the previous inhabitants of North America and Greenland. Skuggifjord Hudson Strait Straumfjörð "Current-fjord", "Stream-fjord" or "Tide-fjord". A fjord in Vinland.
Word order in Old Norse was generally much freer than in Modern English because Old Norse and Old English are synthetic languages, where added prefixes and suffixes to the root word (the core noun, verb, adjective or adverb) carry grammatical meanings, whereas Middle English and Modern English use word order to carry grammatical information, as ...
In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking Age. A few examples of Old Norse loanwords in modern English are (English/Viking Age Old East Norse), in some cases even displacing their Old English cognates: [citation needed]
"Dale" is actually from Old English, although Norse influence preserved it, "gate" meaning street or manner of acting seems extremely archaic or dialectal but alright, "by" doesn't seem to ever be used meaning village or town by itself, and "fell", just as "gate" seems to be quite archaic/dialectal.
A heiti (Old Norse heiti, Modern Icelandic, pl. heiti "name, appellation, designation, term" [1]) is a synonym used in Old Norse poetry in place of the normal word for something. For instance, Old Norse poets might use jór "steed" instead of the prosaic hestr "horse".
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep, groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry, brush and rock (from French).