howard:
Ancient Swedish and 'norse' is not the same but have a lot of common words and expressions. Sweden and Norway have in many ways a common history since more than 1000 years and through the sea trade between Norway and the British islands we share a lot of British words too. Even today the Swedish language has dialects that uses the 'old' words that are more similar to 'norse' than to Swedish. Very much so in the part of Sweden where I live. One example: the Swedish word for 'church' is 'kyrka' but here in Jämtland they say 'körsa' (where k=ch and ö=eo) pronounced much more like church than 'kyrka'.
In Swedish we also have several words for the same thing, but they tend to disappear from the 'spoken' language which I think is sad because it's among those words you can see the similarities between our languages.
