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Scandinavian Much of English is made up of words from other languages, and the languages of Scandinavia are important contributors in this respect, especially in their shared early form Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. This North Germanic language is closely related to English, which belongs to the West Germanic group. Vikings settled in much of England, and between 1016 and 1042 part of the country was ruled by Danish kings, and indeed words from the early period are so integral to English that they are hardly regarded as borrowings: words such as anger, bag, call, dirt, husband, ill, law, near, odd, sale, seem, want, window, and two of the commonest verbs get and take. The penetration of Norse is such that it provides some of the "grammatical" or "functional" words of English, for example, both and the preposition like, and most notably the personal pronouns their, them, and they, which replaced their Old English equivalents, which began with h-. Other forms from Old Norse that have ousted related native English words include egg (Old English had the sound y as in yes), ankle, and gate. Sometimes both Anglo-Saxon and Viking forms survive, either with differences in dialectal distribution, for example, Scottish kirk alongside standard English church, or with differentiation of meaning, as with shirt (English) alongside skirt (from Old Norse). Native and Norse elements have combined freely, for example, in awkward (from obsolete awk "turned the wrong way," from Old Norse afugr "turned backwards" + the English suffix -ward) and blackmail (from black + obsolete mail "tribute, tax" from Old Norse mál "speech, agreement"), and English idiom has modeled itself on Norse, as in afoot, partly based on Old Norse á fótum "on foot," and upon, based on Old Norse upp á.
Some relatively modern words also trace their ancestry to Old Norse. Berserk, for instance, is recorded only from the early 19th century, but derives from a Norse word meaning "wild warrior," which is probably formed from the stem of bjorn "bear" with serkr "shirt."
The modern Scandinavian languages such as Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish have provided in particular terms reflecting occupations and activities of northern peoples: seafaring, fisheries, and winter sports. The minke whale, narwhal, rorqual (via French from Norwegian røyrkval, from an Old Norse word meaning literally "red whale"), and sei whale may feed on krill, and whalers might flense (strip the skin or blubber from) them (from Danish). Other ocean creatures with North Germanic names include the auk, brisling, eider (from Icelandic), fulmar, and kraken, a huge sea monster shaped like a giant squid, periodically reported by Norwegian fishermen since the 16th century; from the land come the lemming, mink, and, perhaps surprisingly, the vole. In winter sports Norwegian has provided ski, slalom, and skijoring, a sport in which a skier is towed across a frozen surface by a horse or vehicle. Swedish has made its sporting contribution with orienteering (an Anglicization of Swedish orientering) and fartlek (literally "speed play"), another name for interval training.
Scandinavian foods have inevitably been welcomed into English: gravlax, rutabaga, and the Swedish smorgasbord (literally "bread-and-butter table"), which has become familiar enough to develop a figurative meaning, "a wide variety." Adopted geographic features include the fjord and the geyser (named for Geysir, a hot spring in Iceland). In science Scandinavia has provided the name for the element tungsten, and the prefixes for units atto- and femto-, from words meaning "eighteen" and "fifteen" respectively. In cultural life Sweden has made the significant contribution of the ombudsman.
One word of individual interest is gauntlet (the kind that you "run"). Its Scandinavian origin has been concealed by identification with the completely different word (from French) for a long glove with a wide cuff. The gauntlet was a punishment formerly used in the military in which a soldier was forced to run between two lines of men armed with weapons who beat him as he passed; its earlier form in English was gantlope, which came from Swedish gatlopp "passageway."
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