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European humanists took a great interest, not only in the origins of their
own mother tongues, but also in the classification of cognate languages.
Amongst other things, this led scholars from the Continental West Germanic
area (i.e. the territory of present-day German and Dutch-Flemish) to study
the place and characteristics of the Scandinavian languages within the
Germanic language family. The present article presents and discusses the
views of C. Gessner, J.G. Becanus, B. Vulcanius, J.J. Scaliger, F. Junius, J.
Vlitius and L. ten Kate with regard to this topic. Covering the period from
1555 to 1723, their work displays a gradual improvement in scientific quality
and even prefigures many insights of modern linguistics. Not only did
these scholars recognize the individuality of the different Scandinavian languages
(with the exception of Faroese), they also referred to them as separate
linguae, thus reflecting, or at least foreshadowing, the Nordic varieties’
own ongoing development into distinct standard languages.
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