標題は，英語史では古くから論じられている問題である．答えが知りたい，しかし本当のところはわかり得ない，というもどかしい問題でもある．
昨日の記事「#3980. 古英語と古ノルド語の接触の結果は koineisation か？ (2)」 ([2020-03-20-1]) で取り上げた Warner は，両者がそこそこ理解できたという前提の上で議論を進めているが，もちろんこの前提自体が妥当かどうかという問題があることは十分に意識している．実際，これまで様々な意見が提出されてきたことに触れ，その典拠も挙げてくれている (375) ．おもしろく便利なので，以下にその箇所を引用しておこう．
How mutually comprehensible were the two languages? There is a range of views on this. 'The Englishmen and Northmen could easily understand each other in their own languages." says Björkmann (1900--2: 8), and Jespersen agreed. Haugen (1976: 138) writes that the languages were 'closely related and probably mutually intelligible,' Tristram (2004: 94) that 'with a little effort' speakers of Anglian and Norse 'were very well able to communicate in their everyday dealings.' Poussa thinks that 'communication between speakers of the different languages [would have been] possible, but not easy.' (1982: 27). Kastovsky (1992: 328--9) and Hansen (1984) think that mutual intelligibility was not high and that bilingualism would have been required.
Warner (375--76) が支持しているのは主として Townend の見解だ．
This area has recently been carefully re-examined by Townend (2000, 2002) and his claim that the languages were 'adequately mutually comprehensible' is rather convincing. He reminds us that in the mid-to-late ninth century we are only 400 years from the common North-West Germanic attested in runic inscriptions in southern Scandinavia and Jutland; a dialect area whose language was 'largely uniform' (Nielsen 1989: 5), and in which 'the evidence of both dialect grouping and the runic language supports the notion of a North-West Germanic continuum which contained (in proximity) speakers of the antecedents of both Norse and English' (Townend 2002: 25). We should not think in terms of Late West Saxon and Icelandic, the common citation forms: the English dialect is Anglian, which is closer to Norse, and Icelandic is 400 years later. So, for example, the suggestion made by Kastovsky (1992: 329) and Milroy (1997: 319) that the suffixed definite article of Norse would have contributed to difficulty of communication is unlikely to be relevant, since this development is not recorded until the eleventh century (Townend 2002: 183 note 1; 198 note 15)
なお，私自身の立場は Townend や Warner に近く「簡単な内容の会話であればおよそ通じたにちがいない」である．
・ Warner, Anthony. "English-Norse Contact, Simplification, and Sociolinguistic Typology." Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 118 (2017): 317--404.
・ Björkmann, Eric. Scandinavian Loan-Words in Middle English. Halle: Niemeyer, 1900--02.
・ Jespersen, O. Growth and Structure of the English Language. 9th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1938.
・ Haugen, Einar. The Scandinavian Languages: An Introduction to their History. London: Faber, 1976.
・ Tristram, H. "Diglossia in Anglo-Saxon England or What was Spoken Old English Like?" Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 40 (2004): 87--110.
・ Poussa, P. "The Evolution of Early Standard English: The Creolization Hypothesis." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 14 (1982): 69--85.
・ Kastovsky, Dieter. "Semantics and Vocabulary." The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard M. Hogg. Cambridge: CUP, 1992. 290--408.
・ Hansen, B. H. "The Historical Implications of the Scandinavian Linguistic Element in English: A Theoretical Evaluation." Nowele 4 (1984): 53--95.
・ Townend, M. "Viking Age England as a Bilingual Society." Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Ed. Dawn Hadley and J. D. Richards. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. 89--105
・ Townend, M. Language and History in Viking Age England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2002.
・ Nielsen, Hans Frede. Germanic Languages: Origins and Early Dialectal Interrelations. Tuscaloosa/London: U of Alabama P, 1989.
・ Milroy, James 1997. "Internal versus External Motivations of Linguistic Change." Multilingua 16 (1997): 311--23.
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