9. The relation between borrowed and native words.

It will be seen from the words in the above lists that in many cases the new words could have supplied no real need in the English vocabulary.
They made their way into English simply as the result of the mixture of the two peoples.
The Scandinavian and the English words were being used side by side, and the survival of one or the other must often have been a matter of chance. Under such circumstances a number of things might happen:
a) Where words in the two languages coincides more or less in form and meaning, the modern word stands at the same time for both its English and Scandinavian
ancestors.
b) Where there were differences of form, the English words often survived. Some confusion must have existed in the Danish area between the Scandinavian and the English form of many words, a confusion that is clearly betrayed in the survival of such hybrid forms as shriek and screech. All this merely goes to show that in the Scandinavian influence on the English language we have to do with the intimate mingling of the two tongues. The results are just what we should expect when two rather similar languages are spoken for upwards of two centuries in the same area.

8. Scandinavian Loanwords and their character.

It was after the Danes had begun to settle down peacefully in the island and
enter into the ordinary relations of life with the English that Scandinavian words began to enter in numbers into the language. The Danish invasions were not like theintroduction of Christianity, bringing the English into contact with a different civilization and introducing them to many things, physical as well as spiritual, that they had not known before. The civilization of the invaders was very much like that of the English themselves. Consequently the Scandinavian elements that entered the English language would make their way into it through the give-and-take of everyday life.
Among nouns that came in are tree, band, bank, birth, booth, bull, calf, dirt, down, egg, fellow, guess, keel, kid, leg, link, race, reef, root, score, scrap, seat, sister, skin, skill, steak…etc. Among adjectives we find awkward, flat, ill, loose, low, meek, muggy, odd, rotten, scant, sly, tattered, tight and weak. There are also a surprising number of common verbs among the borrowings, like to bait, bask, call, cast, clip, cow, crawl, die, droop, gape, gasp, get, give, lift, nag, rid, scare, scowl, snub, sprint, take, thrive, thrust.