Hello friends!
We’re back! Isn’t that awesome?!
Today, we’re going to make an assertion that you may not like: you know the third person plural pronouns in English, i.e. they, them and their(s)?
Well (you’re gonna hate us): they aren’t English.
Okay, so that may not be exactly true. Let’s say: they weren’t English to begin with.
It’s actually a rather amazing evidence of borrowing – in this case, English borrowed from a little language called Old Norse, spoken by the Vikings.
You might be sitting at home thinking that we’re talking absolute BS right now, pronouns are rarely borrowed from other languages because they are so integral in the language’s grammar, right? (Okay, you might not have known that, but now you do!) Bear with us and let’s have a look at the same pronouns in all modern languages that we know comes from Old Norse: Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish!
| English | Icelandic | Danish | Norwegian | Swedish |
| they | þeir/þá/þær/þau | de | de | de |
| them | þeim | dem | dem | dem |
| their(s) | þeirra | deres | deres | deras |
Shockingly similar, don’t you think?
Well, perhaps not so shockingly. After all, they all come from the same thing: the Old Norse plural pronouns.
Why, exactly, English decided to borrow these are somewhat lost in the mysteries of time. Old English, of course, already had the plural pronoun hīe, so why borrow?
Well, while we are still not sure exactly how this borrowing took place, Old English and Old Norse were in close contact for centuries in the area of densest viking settlement (the Danelaw), so forms like these were likely borrowed between the two languages to make communication easier. It might also be that the Old English plural pronoun had grown too similar to the singular pronouns hī (m.), hit (n.) and hēo (f.) in pronunciation that it started to become an issue. Both of these explanations are possible.
What we do know though: English borrowed a lot from Old Norse, probably more than most native-English speakers realize. As a matter of fact, some of the most common words in English are Norse in origin (for example, egg; knife; skirt; eye; sister, and so on). The nordic languages (except for Icelandic) are making up for it though and borrows extensively from English today (in Sweden, we even have commercials at bus stops using English terminology). So don’t feel bad about it, English, buuut…
Tune in next week when we’ll keep going at it with the English pronoun they – is it always a plural pronoun?
Can’t wait? Check out the etymology of they, them and their in the meantime!
See you next week!