They also followed the lead of the Celts, rendering the language in whatever way seemed most natural to them. It is amply documented that they left English with thousands of new words, including ones that seem very intimately ‘us’: sing the old song ‘Get Happy’ and the words in that title are from Norse. Sometimes they seemed to want to stake the language with ‘We’re here, too’ signs, matching our native words with the equivalent ones from Norse, leaving doublets such as ‹dike› (them) and ‹ditch› (us), ‹scatter› (them) and ‹shatter› (us), and ‹ship› (us) vs ‹skipper› (Norse for ‹ship› was ‹skip›, and so ‹skipper› is ‘shipper’).
But the words were just the beginning. They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say ‹Which town do you come from?›, ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before the ‹wh›-word to make ‹From which town do you come?› In English, sentences with ‘dangling prepositions’ are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a wet-fish issue with them, too: normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way. Spanish speakers: note that ‹El hombre quien yo llegué con› (‘The man whom I came with’) feels about as natural as wearing your pants inside out. Every now and then a language turns out to allow this: one indigenous one in Mexico, another one in Liberia. But that’s it. Overall, it’s an oddity. Yet, wouldn’t you know, it’s one that Old Norse also happened to permit (and which Danish retains).
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