The Languages of Scandinavia

Seven Sisters of the North

Ruth H. Sanders

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226493923
• Thema: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Thema: Sprachwissenschaft

From fjords to mountains, schools of herring to herds of reindeer, Scandinavia is rich in astonishing natural beauty. Less well known, however, is that it is also rich in languages. Home to seven languages, Scandinavia has traditionally been understood as linguistically bifurcated between its five Germanic languages (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese) and its two Finno-Ugric ones (Finnish and Sámi). In The Languages of Scandinavia, Ruth H. Sanders takes a pioneering approach: she considers these Seven Sisters of the North together.While the two linguistic families that comprise Scandinavia's languages ultimately have differing origins, the Seven Sisters have coexisted side by side for millennia. As Sanders reveals, a crisscrossing of names, territories, and even to some extent language genetics—intimate language contact—has created a body of shared culture, experience, and linguistic influences that is illuminated when the story of these seven languages is told as one. Exploring everything from the famed whalebone Lewis Chessmen of Norse origin to the interactions between the Black Death and the Norwegian language, The Languages of Scandinavia offers profound insight into languages with a cultural impact deep-rooted and far-reaching, from the Icelandic sagas to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's internationally popular Millennium trilogy. Sanders's book is both an accessible work of linguistic scholarship and a fascinating intellectual history of language.

1

Prologue to History

Habet quoque id ipsum immensum pelagus in parte arctoa, id est septentrionali, amplam insulam nomine Scandiam, unde Nobis sermo, si Dominus jubaverit, est assumendus.

(The same mighty sea has also in its arctic region, that is in the north, a great island named Scandza, from whence my tale [by God’s grace] shall take its beginning.)

Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, AD 551.

THE ICE MELTS; THE SETTLERS ARRIVE

The last gasp of the Ice Age, or the Last Glacial Maximum, as it is called by geologists, ended around 20,000 BC. Its vast glaciers covered the North and most of the British Isles, along with the greater part of northern continental Europe. They took in what are now the northern parts of France, Germany, Poland, and Russia, including Siberia. This ice-over was the latest of several that had waxed and waned in parts of the Northern Hemisphere over millions of years. By around 10,000 BC, only some polar regions remained under ice. The people arrived in the North soon afterward, when plant and animal colonization in Fennoscandia was sufficient to support human population.

Studies of archaeological and human remains in both Sweden and Finland suggest that these early settlers are the ancestors of today’s Scandinavians (Karlsson et al. 2006, 963). Whether they were replacing even earlier, preglacial populations of the North who had been killed off or driven away by the inhospitable cold and barrenness of the rumbling glaciers, we cannot know. Presumably any earlier populations would have been not Homo sapiens (biologically modern humans) but Neanderthals. The massive moving mountains of ice scraped away all evidence that would tell us with certainty.

Clans of hunter-fisher-gatherers began to enter Scandinavia as the last Ice Age ended, around fifteen thousand years ago. “The land was already infiltrated by vegetation, then entered by animals, and eventually occupied by people sometime after 13,000 BC,” writes archaeologist T. Douglas Price (2015, 1). Signs of settlement, preserved in layers of Scandinavian bog and unearthed in modern times, include fishing hooks, axes, and heaps of hazelnut shells. Hunting of elk and reindeer has been dated by archaeologists to around 9000 BC in what is now Scania (local name Skåne, in southern Sweden), while reindeer hunting in Finland can be reliably dated at the earliest to around 6000 BC (Siiriäinen 2003, 45–47).

ERAS OF THIS CHAPTER

The Stone Age, named for the stone that was the principal material the people used to make tools, occurred later in the North than on the European mainland, in tandem with the later settlement process in the North. The Stone Age is usually considered to have three parts everywhere:

• The Paleolithic, including, in Scandinavia, the periods before as well as after the earliest human habitation sometimes referred to as Early Stone Age

• The Mesolithic, in Scandinavia beginning around 6000 BC

• The Neolithic, also called Late Stone Age, in Scandinavia beginning around 4000 BC

The three eras are defined by the increasing sophistication of design and the skill of manufacture visible at their borders. The Neolithic saw the beginnings of agriculture and domestication of farm animals such as cattle, accomplishments that fundamentally changed human life wherever they occurred.

Though the people of the North had long imported copper and bronze from other regions, it was not until about 1800 BC that they learned to smelt copper and manufacture bronze (copper alloyed with tin or arsenic), thus beginning the Nordic Bronze Age. Now they were able to forge more effective weapons and utensils than the old tools chipped out of stone.

In the Celtic Iron Age, which lasted roughly from 600 BC to AD 1, the knowledge of smelting and casting iron was brought to the North by Celts, or perhaps by northerners who had traveled to Celtic regions of the European continent. In the Roman Iron Age, AD 1–400, trade with the Roman Empire flourished over land and water routes from continental Europe, and Roman influence is seen in Scandinavian methods and types of ironworking.

The peoples of the North during the ages depicted in this chapter did not yet have any form of writing; they recorded the events of their lives in pictorial rock carvings, leaving only archaeological scraps for modern scientists to discover. Written documentation of large or small events cannot be dated anywhere in the world before about 4000 BC in the Middle East and southern Europe, and these writings did not include descriptions of the North until Roman times, thousands of years later. Table 3 lists some of the major events that occurred between the time when the North was settled and the time when evidence of its peoples emerged in recorded history.

THE SETTLERS OF THE NORTH

Evidence of the earliest human settlement of the very far north of Fennoscandia, which later became Sámi territory, was found at the River Utsjoki, in northern Finnish Lapland, on the border with Norway. Settlers arrived there as early as 8100 BC from Lake Ladoga, in what is today northwestern Russia (Aikio 2004, 5); transient hunters may have been in the area even earlier. Archaeological evidence provides no clue as to their language (more on this in chapter 7).

The earliest known settlers in southern Finland, their language likewise still unidentified, left evidence of their settlement around 7200 BC (Jutikkala and Pirinen 1988, 10). Of varying tribes and genetic backgrounds, the settlers seem to have come from many areas, including the Pontic steppes (today western Ukraine and Kazakhstan), though their ancestral tribal homelands may well have been in Europe or even the Middle East.

On the Danish and Norwegian-Swedish peninsulas and their associated North Sea islands, the earliest post–Ice Age settlers were probably migrants from the northwestern coasts of the European continent. It is not known what language they spoke or from what location they had previously migrated.

Table 3. Timetable, 20,000 BC–AD 400

APPROXIMATE YEAR	IN THE NORTH	ELSEWHERE
20,000 BC	Last Glacial Maximum (the ice had reached its peak)	Neanderthals extinct in Europe; Paleolithic art
10,000 BC	Scandinavian Paleolithic Era (early Stone Age); earliest known settlement of modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) in Danish and Scandinavian peninsulas	Dawn of agriculture in the Middle East, world population estimated at a few million (8000 BC; Gilbert 2005, 9)
6000 BC	Scandinavian Mesolithic Era; earliest known reindeer hunting in Finland	Beekeeping depicted in cave paintings in Spain
4500–4000 BC	Emergence of Proto-Finno-Ugric, ancestor of Finnish, Sámi, and Estonian; Scandinavian Neolithic Era (New Stone Age) begins; first agriculture and domestication of animals	Earliest Sumerian writing, done on clay tablets; first year of Jewish calendar (3760 BC); great pyramid of Gizeh erected (2900 BC)
2500–1001 BC	Emergence of Proto-Indo-European, ancestor of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages; rock carving at Rødøy, Norway, depicting skiing; Dolmen (single-chamber stone tomb) period in Scandinavia	Earliest Egyptian mummies; Stonehenge (England); Israelites, according to biblical tradition, leave Egypt, led by Moses; rule of Hammurabi (1800 BC)
1000–701 BC	Nordic Bronze Age—beginning of smelting of copper and bronze	Iliad and Odyssey composed around end of 8th century (traditionally ascribed to Homer); Rome founded (753 BC)
699–1 BC	Emergence of Proto-Germanic, ancestor of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, German, and English; Celtic Iron Age, knowledge of iron smelting and casting arrives in Scandinavia under Celtic influence	Aramaic language begins to replace Hebrew; Babylonian captivity of the Jews; height of classical Greek culture (Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes)
AD 1–400	Roman Iron Age in Scandinavia brings Roman-influenced iron manufacture; trade with Rome and points south via Roman trade routes	Birth of Jesus of Nazareth (ca. AD 6); Constantinople founded (AD 324); Roman legions begin to leave Britain (AD 383)

Source: Adapted from Grun 2005.

These migrations of peoples, from the east and from the west, settled what is today Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. But when did the ancestors of the languages we know today come to the North? To answer this question, we must look to deep history in the areas both west and east of the Ural Mountains, where the two ancestor languages of the North got their start.

The Language Families of the North

Historical linguistics often categorizes languages into families; the oldest ancestor language that linguists have been able to identify is characterized as the “mother” of the “daughter” languages that developed from it. Proto-languages are theoretical reconstructions of languages that have not survived to the present, based on linguistic evidence (for example, from similar words in related languages) as well as cultural and archaeological evidence. It cannot be known with certainty whether a given proto-language actually existed in its reconstructed form, and for this reason words or parts of words hypothesized for proto-languages generally appear with an asterisk in front of them. Two proto-languages are the oldest known ancestors of the languages of the North: Proto-Uralic and Proto-Indo-European. Both were once spoken over large areas of the Eurasian continent, along with an unknown number of other languages that have left no trace in modern times.

Proto-Uralic (PU) is the older of the two. Spoken from probably around 5000 BC in the areas to the east of the Ural Mountains (hence “Uralic”), it is the ancestor of thirty or so languages spoken both east and west of the Urals, including in the Arctic territories of what is today Russia. Proto-Finno-Ugric (PFU) is a western subgroup of Proto-Uralic believed to date from around 4500 BC (dating is from Janhunen 2009, 68) and is the one more relevant in this volume, since PFU is the more immediate ancestor of Finnish and Sámi (for a discussion of the PU/PFU language family, see Campbell and Poser 2008, 88).

However, there is evidence of a non-PU/PFU language or languages, now extinct, spoken in Sámi territory in very early times and called by linguists Paleo-Laplandic. Paleo-Laplandic is believed to be a substrate language underlying Sámi; it left its footprints in words not traceable to Proto-Finno-Ugric or to any other known language. Finnish linguist Ante Aikio sees evidence of a process of linguistic replacement rather than of population replacement. “The earlier speakers of ‘Paleo-Laplandic’ languages belong to the cultural and genetic ancestors of the Saami even if they were not their linguis...