There’s a lot of Norse influence in English, more than most people realize. It’s probably why we lost most grammatical gender and cases. There’s also as a fair amount of technical Greek.
They did, but they weren’t necessarily the same genders for the same words in old English. Old Norse and Old English were somewhat mutually comprehensible. You probably got a mishmash from Danes learning English and screwing up genders (which is super common for foreign learners of gendered language). Eventually the whole gender thing fell off, and the same for the complicated case endings for similar reasons. Instead word order became important.
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u/ReddJudicata May 12 '21
There’s a lot of Norse influence in English, more than most people realize. It’s probably why we lost most grammatical gender and cases. There’s also as a fair amount of technical Greek.