History of Danish

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This article is about the history and evolution of the Danish language. For the history of the Danish people, see Danes. For the history of the Danish culture, see culture of Denmark.

The approximate extent of Old Norse and related languages in the early 10th century:
  Old West Norse dialect
  Old East Norse dialect
  Old Gutnish dialect
  Old English
  Crimean Gothic
  Other Germanic languages with which Old Norse still retained some mutual intelligibility
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The

Old East Norse, the common predecessor of Danish and Swedish. It was a late form of common Old Norse. The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided the history of Danish into "Old Danish" from 800 AD to 1525 and "Modern Danish" from 1525 and onwards. He subdivided Old Danish into "Runic Danish" (800–1100), Early Middle Danish (1100–1350) and Late Middle Danish (1350–1525).[1]

Runic Danish

Main article:
Old East Norse

Old East Norse is in Sweden called

runic alphabet. Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the Elder Futhark alphabet, Old Norse was written with the Younger Futhark alphabet, which only had 16 letters. Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel
u which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.

A change that separated Old East Norse (Runic Swedish/Danish) from Old West Norse was the change of the diphthong æi (Old West Norse ei) to the monophthong e, as in stæin to sten. This is reflected in runic inscriptions where the older read stain and the later stin. There was also a change of au as in dauðr into ø as in døðr. This change is shown in runic inscriptions as a change from tauþr into tuþr. Moreover, the øy (Old West Norse ey) diphthong changed into ø as well, as in the Old Norse word for "island".

Middle Danish

Fangær man saar i hor seng mæth annæns mansz kunæ. oc kumær han burt liuænd....
"If one catches someone in the whore-bed with another man's wife and he comes away alive..."

Jutlandic Law, 1241 [2]

takær bondæ annær man mæth sin kunæ oc kumar swa at han dræpær anti mannen....
"If a peasant takes another man with his wife and does it happen that he does not kill the man..."

The Zealandic Law of Erik, approx. 1250[2]

hittær man annær man i siangu mæþ aþulkunu sinni ok dræpær bondæn horkarkl i sængu mæþ hænnæ....
"If one finds another man in bed with one's wedded wife and if the peasant kills the whore-churl in bed with her..."

Scanian Law, approx. 1216[2]

From 1100 and onwards, the dialect of Denmark began to diverge from that of Sweden. The innovations spread unevenly from Denmark which created a series of minor dialectal boundaries,

Zealand to Svealand
. In the medieval period Danish emerged as a separate language from Swedish. The main written language was Latin, and the few Danish language texts preserved from this period are written in the Latin alphabet, although the runic alphabet seems to have lingered in popular usage in some areas. The main text types written in this period are laws, which were formulated in the vernacular language to be accessible also to those who were not Latinate. The
Low German, and many Low German loan words were introduced.[4]

Renaissance and Reformation

With the

Protestant Reformation in 1536, Danish also became the language of religion, which sparked a new interest in using Danish as a literary language. It is also in this period that Danish begins to take on the linguistic traits that differentiate it from Swedish and Norwegian, such as the stød
and the voicing of many stop consonants.

The first printed book in Danish dates from 1495, "Rimkrøniken" (the Rhyming Chronicle), a history book told in rhymed verses.[5] The first complete translation of the Bible in Danish, the Bible of Christian III, some parts translated by Christiern Pedersen, was published in 1550. Pedersen's orthographic choices set the de facto standard for subsequent writing in Danish.[6]

Modern Danish

The first translation of the Bible in Danish was published in 1550.

Some notable authors of works in Danish are

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(awarded 1944).

References

  1. ^ Jørgensen 2016, p. 82.
  2. ^ a b c Pedersen 1996, p. 220.
  3. ^ Pedersen 1996, pp. 219–21.
  4. ^ Pedersen 1996, pp. 221–224.
  5. ^ "Bog Museum (Book Museum)". Royal Danish Library. Archived from the original on 21 December 2014.
  6. ^ Pedersen 1996, p. 225.
  7. ISBN 978-0-8166-0896-6
    .

Bibliography

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