The Danish Connection

Abstract

The Danish Connection John M. Ramsay What is your reaction when a student asks, "Will you larn me to do that?" What is your reaction when a neighbor asks, "Can I loan that offen ya?" I can remember when such speech offended me. Today, hearing such usages is like finding large nuggets of gold in mine tailings. The subject of this article is the relationship between snobbery and ignorance. In the course of teaching folk arts at Berea College for the past sixteen years I have become acutely aware of how prone people are to be snobbish, especially when it comes to cultural matters. It has also seemed that the more educated, or more precisely the more miseducated people are, the more snobbish they become. Professors can be among the worst snobs. Bill Holm in Coming Home Crazy (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis, 1990), his newly published book written upon his return from teaching assignments in the People's Republic of China, puts it nicely . . . It it one thing to read abstractly that you are not the center of the universe, and that truth, divine or otherwise (if such a distinction is possible), was not dropped exclusively in your lap, for your personal amusement and salvation. The lesson to be learned from these shocks [i.e. an American confronting Chinese culture in the flesh] is to cultivate modesty and curiosity and to eschew evangelism and certainty. We do not need more fixed ideas but more experience ... (p. 75). Folk culture, especially the highly cultural art of speech, can be very instructive in "cultivating modesty." We return to our initial examples: using "learn" (larn) rather than "teach" and "loan" rather than "borrow." Are these usages inadvertent mistakes made by the uneducated or do they represent something else? Your answer will likely depend upon the degree of your education and on your general orientation to life. Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Remember your initial response to the usage of larn and loan for comparison with any revision you might make after you read the following information. English and Danish basically derive from the same ancient Nordic language. The linkage is quite clear. Take, for example, the following passage in Danish adapted 31 from Danish, An Elementary Grammar and Reader by Elias Bredsdorff and published by Cambridge University press (1958 revision, pp. 2-3). It is decipherable by those who read English and have never seen Danish (orally it would be unrecognizable because of pronunciation differences). Nu vil vi begynde. Vi vil lœre dansk. Mange Now will we begin. We will learn Danish. Many danske ord er i familie med Danish words are in family with (are related to) engelske ord. Vi er i et rum i et hus i English words. We are in a room in a house in England. Her er en d0r, og der er to England. Here is a door, and there are two vinduer. Vi kan se ud i en park, hvor der er windows. We can see out in a park where there are mange b0rn. Solen skinner; de er en varm dag. many children. The sun shines; it is a warm day. Det er mandag den f0rste September. I parken sidder It is Monday the first of September. In the park sits en ung mand pâ en baenk og dr0mmer. Pa hans knee a young man on a bench and dreams. On his knee er en aben bog. is an open book. The connection between Danish and English has a bearing on the usage we are considering for learn and loan. Danes have one word to serve for the English verbs teach and learn; it is laere¿ A teacher is a laerer. Danes also have one word for borrow and loan; it is lane. °A lender is a langiver and a borrower is a lantager. The English verbs, learn and loan, apparently have a Scandinavian connection. The English verbs teach and borrow, however, must have entered the English language from other than the Nordic root as there is no comparable word in the Scandinavian languages. A newspaper reporter visiting Berea College's annual Mountain Folk Festival recently commented that she had not been aware...