Early old norse.

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Prinsessa
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Prinsessa »

As in modern Icelandic. What condition governed the lack of *we > o in that form only?
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

Prinsessa wrote:As in modern Icelandic. What condition governed the lack of *we > o in that form only?
It's a bit unclear. The changes *we > *o (as in koma) and *wa > *o (as in Sw tolv and OIc tólf from earlier twalf, still found on the Rök Stone) seem to be somewhat sporadic. It seems that the change may have been blocked by a long coda though, which explain why only the gen.pl in –na retains *we (other endings begin in a vowel).

See here:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/div ... TEXT01.pdf
(In Swedish)
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Re: Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth wrote:Was looking a bit in the east-geatish law the other day and found the a-umlaut alternation kona-kunu but son sona synir sunum
Vowel harmony?
Ephraim wrote:The form kuna is interesting. The form is certainly found in OSw, along with kona, but I'm not sure if it's found in OIc. I don't think kona has a-umlaut, it's actually the result of the change *we > *o (the original *we is still found in the genitive plural).
Note that *we > *u could've happened in parallel. The form kuma 'come' isn't exactly unheard of in the dialects (with modernized pronunciation, of course), rather pretty common. E.g., kumå and kumme/kumma in Elfdalian and Gutnish, respectively.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Another sporadic sound change *we > *ø has also been suggested in words like *swefna > Sw. sömn and OIc søfn (in addition to svefn). It has been suggested that OIc kømr represent this change rather than *o > *ø via i-umlaut, as would have been my initial hypothesis.

The i-umlaut would not have been a regular sound change for verb verb *komą as this is a short stem, but OIc seems to have introduced i-umlaut analogically in the present indicative singular of most verbs. Old East Norse probably did the opposite.
DrGeoffStandish wrote:
HinGambleGoth wrote:Was looking a bit in the east-geatish law the other day and found the a-umlaut alternation kona-kunu but son sona synir sunum
Vowel harmony?
It could indeed be a form of vowel harmony (tilljämning in Swedish). Walldén's essay posted above quotes Hesselman:

"Den fsv. växlingen kona : kunum, tydligast i östgötalagens textkodex, beror utan tvivel på fsv. ynge ’tilljämning’ av o > u framför u i ändelsen; likaså de mindre tydliga växlingarna son sons sona : sunum och koma etc.: kumin i ÖgL och ett par andra fornsvenska texter"

Walldén also quotes von Friesen who agrees with Hasselman:
"Det är icke tvivel om att böjningen kona kunu här representerar en ursprunglig fördelning av o och u eller m. a. o. att kunu framgått ur konu genom s.k. tilljämning".
DrGeoffStandish wrote:Note that *we > *u could've happened in parallel. The form kuma 'come' isn't exactly unheard of in the dialects (with modernized pronunciation, of course), rather pretty common. E.g., kumå and kumme/kumma in Elfdalian and Gutnish, respectively.
Apparently, kuma is found already on Old Swedish and Old Danish as a sideform of koma, so at least the form is old.

In Old Gutnish, the outcome of the sporadic change of *we and *wa seems to have always been *u, as is expected as OGu generally had /o/ only before /r/.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Are there any manuscripts that distinguish /æ/ from i-umlauted /a/ from inhereted short /e/? In Oic you have both spelt with <e> and in Oswe <æ>, apparently they merged early, did they ever contrast?

That brings up another question, where many sounds so marginally different so that the medieval scribes didnt bother separating them? For instance the letter <æ> or <e> was more or less randomly used for everthing from short *a,*æ,*e,*i or even epicentic vowels randomly, in the original un-normalized manuscripts.

This could also apply to nasal vowels, even though they were probably common in medieval scandinavian they almost never written, probably because the scribes didnt have any proper way of marking them or that they didnt bother since they where marginal.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:
Prinsessa wrote:As in modern Icelandic. What condition governed the lack of *we > o in that form only?
It's a bit unclear. The changes *we > *o (as in koma) and *wa > *o (as in Sw tolv and OIc tólf from earlier twalf, still found on the Rök Stone) seem to be somewhat sporadic. It seems that the change may have been blocked by a long coda though, which explain why only the gen.pl in –na retains *we (other endings begin in a vowel).

See here:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/div ... TEXT01.pdf
(In Swedish)
Right, I didn't think of the fact that the n in that form is long too. That at least makes sure the conditions weren't identical in that form.

But the lemma kvinne in Scandinavian and Faroese can't have been formed by analogy with that single, not too common inflectional form, eh? Was an unshifted stem retained? What about Danish and Norwegian that have kept both stems? Was the un/shifted one brought in from another dialect into the standard language or vice-versa (since it is generally the case that kone means wife and kvinne means woman)?

Wiktionary's Swedish and Faroese entries for kvinna give the following:
From Old Norse kvæna, from kván (“wife”), from Proto-Germanic *kwenǭ, from Proto-Indo-European *gʷḗn.
So they merged eventually in some dialects but not others?

How come *kwenǭ had *e, btw? I thought PG *e > *i before nasals? Or was it only before clusters beginning in a nasal?
Ephraim wrote:Another sporadic sound change *we > *ø has also been suggested in words like *swefna > Sw. sömn and OIc søfn (in addition to svefn). It has been suggested that OIc kømr represent this change rather than *o > *ø via i-umlaut, as would have been my initial hypothesis.
Or it could've been an i-stem in Pre-Norse, perhaps? *swefniz, despite *swefnaz given for common PG? Those stems shift around sometimes...
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:Are there any manuscripts that distinguish /æ/ from i-umlauted /a/ from inhereted short /e/? In Oic you have both spelt with <e> and in Oswe <æ>, apparently they merged early, did they ever contrast?

That brings up another question, where many sounds so marginally different so that the medieval scribes didnt bother separating them? For instance the letter <æ> or <e> was more or less randomly used for everthing from short *a,*æ,*e,*i or even epicentic vowels randomly, in the original un-normalized manuscripts.
In most dialects they seem to have merged in pre-literary times. I think it has been suggested that they never contrasted, but that the i-umlauted result of *a was always *e.

I don’t think they ever contrast in OSw manuscripts, both merged as /æ/ or raised to /i/ in "palatal environments".

In OIc, they also seem to have merged in pre-literary times. The FGT presents two phonemes written <e> and <ę> but their distribution don’t really seem to match historical *e and *æ from what I understand. See Nordic Languages I p. 885.

It seems like early Old Norwegian manuscripts might have made a distinction between short <e> and short <æ>, though, where <æ> mostly reflected i-umlauted a and the shortended *æi. However, the distinction seem to have been neutralized in some consonantal environments. See Nordic Languages I p. 889.

I think a distinction might have been made in runic writings also, where *æ is written as <a> and *e as <i>. I’m not sure how consistent this is.
HinGambleGoth wrote:This could also apply to nasal vowels, even though they were probably common in medieval scandinavian they almost never written, probably because the scribes didnt have any proper way of marking them or that they didnt bother since they where marginal.
Compare the lack of written indication of accent and length.
Prinsessa wrote:But the lemma kvinne in Scandinavian and Faroese can't have been formed by analogy with that single, not too common inflectional form, eh? Was an unshifted stem retained? What about Danish and Norwegian that have kept both stems? Was the un/shifted one brought in from another dialect into the standard language or vice-versa (since it is generally the case that kone means wife and kvinne means woman)?
Yes, the common view is actually that nom.sg kvenna/kvinna is anagically formed from the genitive plural. If they would have been conservative forms, without the shift *we > *o/u, we would have expected a single n, not a geminate nn. It also seems like only konu/kunu is attested in the oldest manuscripts. See Walldén (the essay I posted above) p. 17 f.

The old form kuna or kona was also retained (I don't know whether a new gen.pl *konna or *kunna is attested) creating two separate words. In Swedish, the word kona is, or was, often derogative.
Prinsessa wrote:Wiktionary's Swedish and Faroese entries for kvinna give the following:
From Old Norse kvæna, from kván (“wife”), from Proto-Germanic *kwenǭ, from Proto-Indo-European *gʷḗn.
So they merged eventually in some dialects but not others?
I think the Wiktionary entries are a bit confused in this case.

OIc kván (sometimes kvæn) is a different word from kona (sometimes kuna) and it seems to have different (but related) PG-origin as the distinction is found in other Germanic languages. Kván always means ’wife’, never woman in general. Poetically, it can be used to mean ’queen’, and it is cognate to english queen.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... nic/kwēniz
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/html/oi_cleas ... b0360.html

As far as I know, OIc kvæna is not a noun (well, it could be the gen.pl of kvæn) but a verb meaning ‘to make a man marry’ and in the mediopassive kvænask ’to take a wife’. This seems to be derived from kván.
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/html/oi_cleas ... b0365.html

Kona or kuna are different words. The form kuna is apparently found in OIc as well. This word mostly mean ’woman’ but sometimes ‘wife’.
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/html/oi_cleas ... b0350.html
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix: ... anic/kwenǭ
Prinsessa wrote:How come *kwenǭ had *e, btw? I thought PG *e > *i before nasals? Or was it only before clusters beginning in a nasal?
The raising only occured if the nasal was in the same syllable as *e.
Prinsessa wrote:Or it could've been an i-stem in Pre-Norse, perhaps? *swefniz, despite *swefnaz given for common PG? Those stems shift around sometimes...
I guess it's possible, since the word is singular only the endings would have been the same. It would have to have been post-PG since it would otherwise have had early i-umlaut e > i.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:Compare the lack of written indication of accent and length.
Accent has never been marked in Scandinavian orthographies, as far as i know, danish does "mark" stød with a silent <d> it seems. To be honest most speakers don't even think about it, it seems to only have importance in dialects with vowel dropping like Jutish or northern Swedish, the FGT doesn't mention it either, Icelandic probably had some form of distinction at the time but nobody thought about it, much like how no Germanic orthography marks aspiration of voiceless stops, velarized /l/ or glottal stops before vowels.
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Re: Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth wrote:Accent has never been marked in Scandinavian orthographies, as far as i know, danish does "mark" stød with a silent <d> it seems.
I mark accent in my Jamtish orthography, if that counts. E.g., I write kast'eð 'the throw' (Swe. 'kastet') with acute accent but kasteð 'threw, thrown' (Swe. 'kastade, kastat, kastad') with grave accent. This way it's always (?) possible to know the accent of a written word.
HinGambleGoth wrote:To be honest most speakers don't even think about it,
Maybe because it's not marked in the written language?
HinGambleGoth wrote:it seems to only have importance in dialects with vowel dropping like Jutish or northern Swedish,
And all Tröndish, most Jamtish, and some Smålandish (including Ölandish) and Värmlandish dialects. It's also important in semiapocopative dialects such as e.g. Elfdalian. (With semi-apocopative I mean those that apocopate certain phonetically based classes of words, e.g. ON batna 'get better, recover, improve'.)
HinGambleGoth wrote:the FGT doesn't mention it either, Icelandic probably had some form of distinction at the time but nobody thought about it,
But that's probably because there were no minimal pairs at the time. (The suffixed definite article wasn't really established at the time. And it really takes apocopation in order to generate substantial amounts of mininal pairs, but this is what you've pointed out already.)
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

DrGeoffStandish wrote:Maybe because it's not marked in the written language?
Neither was length or nasality, as pointed our earlier, there is alot of features of spoken norse that were never or rarely marked in runes or manuscripts, one of the main reasons i started this thread.
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Re: Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth wrote:Neither was length or nasality, as pointed our earlier, there is alot of features of spoken norse that were never or rarely marked in runes or manuscripts, one of the main reasons i started this thread.
Oh, I thought you meant modern Norse languages.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:
Prinsessa wrote:But the lemma kvinne in Scandinavian and Faroese can't have been formed by analogy with that single, not too common inflectional form, eh? Was an unshifted stem retained? What about Danish and Norwegian that have kept both stems? Was the un/shifted one brought in from another dialect into the standard language or vice-versa (since it is generally the case that kone means wife and kvinne means woman)?
Yes, the common view is actually that nom.sg kvenna/kvinna is anagically formed from the genitive plural. If they would have been conservative forms, without the shift *we > *o/u, we would have expected a single n, not a geminate nn. It also seems like only konu/kunu is attested in the oldest manuscripts. See Walldén (the essay I posted above) p. 17 f.
I suppose the compound form kven- might have helped.
Ephraim wrote:OIc kván (sometimes kvæn) is a different word from kona (sometimes kuna)
I know. That's why I was wondering about a merger.
Ephraim wrote:
Prinsessa wrote:How come *kwenǭ had *e, btw? I thought PG *e > *i before nasals? Or was it only before clusters beginning in a nasal?
The raising only occured if the nasal was in the same syllable as *e.
Which, following the phonotactics of PG, would essentially indeed mean that it only happened if the n was followed by another consonant, thus forming a cluster? I.e. in VnV the n is seen as the onset of the next syllable but in VnCV the n is seen as the coda of the first one and C as the onset of the next one?
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

DrGeoffStandish wrote:
HinGambleGoth wrote:the FGT doesn't mention it either, Icelandic probably had some form of distinction at the time but nobody thought about it,
But that's probably because there were no minimal pairs at the time. (The suffixed definite article wasn't really established at the time. And it really takes apocopation in order to generate substantial amounts of mininal pairs, but this is what you've pointed out already.)
The FGT did have the postfixed definite article, though. There is some discussion about whether the article was a suffix or an enclitic at the time (which seems like a very theoretical question) and it may not have been quite as obligatory as in the modern languages. But forms with the article are quite common in the FGT.

There could potentially have been some minimal pairs such as heiðit ‘the brightness of the sky’ (< heið) with accent I and heiðit ‘pagan, heathen (neuter)’ (< heiðinn) with accent II.

Another potential source of minimal pairs would have been the West Norse postfixed negative marker –a or –at. My guess is that the Old West Norse infinitive vaska ‘to wash’ would have had accent II, but vaska ‘I was not’ (vas–k–a < vesa) would have had accent I. Both could potentially have had a nasalized unstressed –a although nasalization was probably lost here before it was lost in stressed syllables.

I guess it is possible that Icelandic had lost the accent distiction already at the time of the FGT, though. But the distinction would have been found in Old Norwegian.
Prinsessa wrote:Which, following the phonotactics of PG, would essentially indeed mean that it only happened if the n was followed by another consonant, thus forming a cluster? I.e. in VnV the n is seen as the onset of the next syllable but in VnCV the n is seen as the coda of the first one and C as the onset of the next one?
Yes, for PG I think the only difference between
1. X > Y / _NC
and
2. X > Y / _N(C)$ (where $ marks a syllabe boundary)
would be that 2 includes a change at the end of word (i.e. X > Y / _N#) whereas 1 does not.

Since *e was only found in stressed syllables (or before *r), the two are almost indistinguishable. Only in stressed monosyllabic words would this has made a difference so it's hard to come up with examples words. The adposition *in < *en is a possible example of e > i _N#, but the change could also have been due to weak stress.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

It's possible that postfixed1 –ðu and –gi could also be distinguished from other elements in Old Icelandic, through differences in accent.

gættu ‘watch!’ (prs.imp.2sg of gæta + enclitic –ðu)
vs
gættu ‘(they) watched’ (prs.ind.3pl of gæta). The final vowel was possibly nasalized at one point.

eigi ’not’ (ei ’ever’ + –gi
vs
eigi ‘has’ (prs.sjv.3sg of eiga)

1 Either suffixed or enclitic.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Why is it that the infinitive marker is a dative preposition in (old) germanic langauges? In OE the infinitive even had a dative case ending when "to" was put before it.

Is the germanic infinitive derived from a noun?

Is it farfetched to assume that instrumental had distinct forms in EON before it merged with dative? Maybe involving short *u, like in OHG?

Are there any other grammatical aspects of EON that were lost or had not developed yet like in the classical literary period, the determined article was, as we mentioned earlier mostly a literary period development, you realy have to search for it, in early old icelandic and in old gutnish it is hard to find at all.

Also, the word order seems to have changes during the period in question, OIC prose has word order fairly similar to modern scandinavian, while there is alot more verb final om OEN, regardles of genre.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:There could potentially have been some minimal pairs such as heiðit ‘the brightness of the sky’ (< heið) with accent I and heiðit ‘pagan, heathen (neuter)’ (< heiðinn) with accent II.
More than potentially, I'd claim. Personally I'm a strong proponent of marking the definite article. Thus, e.g., heið·it 'the brighness of the sky' but heiðit 'pagan, heathen (neuter)'.
Ephraim wrote:Another potential source of minimal pairs would have been the West Norse postfixed negative marker –a or –at. My guess is that the Old West Norse infinitive vaska ‘to wash’ would have had accent II, but vaska ‘I was not’ (vas–k–a < vesa) would have had accent I.
That'd be more than a guess from my side.
Ephraim wrote:I guess it is possible that Icelandic had lost the accent distiction already at the time of the FGT, though. But the distinction would have been found in Old Norwegian.
Hasn't it been proven by Haukur Þorgeirsson a couple of years ago in his PhD thesis that Old Icelandic had accent distinction? This is his conclusion in the end of Ch .9:
      • Sú túlkun á þessu sem hér er lögð til er að íslenska hafi haft aðgreinandi tónkvæði, að minnsta kosti fram á 16. öld
That is, Icelandic had distinct accents until at least the 1600's. (Wonder when Faroese lost the distinction, my guess is later than Icelandic but no later than the 1800's when the language was analyzed thoroughly. Thus, 1700's when the ballads were written down.)
Ephraim wrote:It's possible that postfixed1 –ðu and –gi could also be distinguished from other elements in Old Icelandic, through differences in accent.
Yes! Judging from Swedish, when -du is added the accent doesn't change: vettu 'vet du', siddu 'ser du' etc.. Why should Icekadic work differently?
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

DrGeoffStandish wrote:Hasn't it been proven by Haukur Þorgeirsson a couple of years ago in his PhD thesis that Old Icelandic had accent distinction? This is his conclusion in the end of Ch .9:
      • Sú túlkun á þessu sem hér er lögð til er að íslenska hafi haft aðgreinandi tónkvæði, að minnsta kosti fram á 16. öld
That is, Icelandic had distinct accents until at least the 1600's. (Wonder when Faroese lost the distinction, my guess is later than Icelandic but no later than the 1800's when the language was analyzed thoroughly. Thus, 1700's when the ballads were written down.)
That is interesting, I hadn't really looked into the question. But the arguments for a retained accent distinction seem fairly convincing, even if proven is a strong word.
DrGeoffStandish wrote:Yes! Judging from Swedish, when -du is added the accent doesn't change: vettu 'vet du', siddu 'ser du' etc.. Why should Icekadic work differently?
Yeah, the ðu-postfix appears to be very free-standing and clitic-like, unlike -k which almost behave like an inflectional endings. So if –inn did not affect the accent, it's unlikely that –ðu did.
HinGambleGoth wrote:Why is it that the infinitive marker is a dative preposition in (old) germanic langauges?
It may have been that the infinitive markers developed from constructions marking purpose, see Wessén III p. 146 f.
HinGambleGoth wrote:In OE the infinitive even had a dative case ending when "to" was put before it.

Is the germanic infinitive derived from a noun?
Yes, some kind of verbal noun formation. It would not have been a dative form, but a nom/acc form of a neuter verbal noun (some IE languages do derive their infinitives from dative forms). The WG inflected infinitive is actually a slightly different formation. From what I understand, it reflects a ja-stem. OHG has distinct gen and dat-endings at least, the nom and acc would probably have regularly merged with the non-inflected infinitive.

If the inflected infinitive goes back to PG, the forms would probably have been something like this (based on the Ringe/Wiktionary model of PG):

Non-inflected infinitive:
*beraną

Inflected infinitive:
nom: *beranją
acc: *beranją
dat: *beranjai
gen: *beranjas (-es)
ins: *beranjō
HinGambleGoth wrote:Is it farfetched to assume that instrumental had distinct forms in EON before it merged with dative? Maybe involving short *u, like in OHG?
There aren't many traces of instrumental forms i North Germanic at any stage but I suppose it's still not too farfetched to think that it survived in PN at least (many forms are unattested in PN writing).

Yes, for the a-stem and ō-stem the expected PN ins.sg-ending would have been short *–u. So this could in theory have been preserved into EON with a zero-ending after heavy stems and *–ŭ after light. The fact that the singular ending was often zero, and the plural the same as the dative might have been a motivation for phasing out the case.
HinGambleGoth wrote:Are there any other grammatical aspects of EON that were lost or had not developed yet like in the classical literary period, the determined article was, as we mentioned earlier mostly a literary period development, you realy have to search for it, in early old icelandic and in old gutnish it is hard to find at all.
The most productive negative formation was probably still the *ni immediately before the verb. Other strategies for negation may not have fully developed. For example, the –a/–at suffix seem to be a later West Norse innovation.

Also, there was of course some changes in the pronoun system during the ON period. As you know, *es/eʀ/is/iʀ sometimes worked as a true pronoun in Runic Swedish (Wessén III s. 53 ff).
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Ephraim wrote: There aren't many traces of instrumental forms i North Germanic at any stage but I suppose it's still not too farfetched to think that it survived in PN at least (many forms are unattested in PN writing).
Instrumental was also lost early in gothic. If instrumental survived into PN it would probably triggered u-umlaut, so it is most likely that it was lost already in PN times.
Ephraim wrote: Also, there was of course some changes in the pronoun system during the ON period. As you know, *es/eʀ/is/iʀ sometimes worked as a true pronoun in Runic Swedish (Wessén III s. 53 ff).
Maybe we can assume that PN had pronouns similar to gothic and OHG, and that the later forms, ancestral to modern scandinavian forms, are derived from the same root as :deu: jener and :eng: yonder that following the /j/ loss, had /h/ added in analogy.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:Instrumental was also lost early in gothic. If instrumental survived into PN it would probably triggered u-umlaut, so it is most likely that it was lost already in PN times.
That's true, in some a-stem nouns the ins.sg would also have been distinguished from the acc.sg by u-umlaut. If it persisted into the ON period, perhaps we would at least have found fossilized instrumental forms used as adverbs. Something like *ɔrm ‘by arm’.
HinGambleGoth wrote:Maybe we can assume that PN had pronouns similar to gothic and OHG, and that the later forms, ancestral to modern scandinavian forms, are derived from the same root as :deu: jener and :eng: yonder that following the /j/ loss, had /h/ added in analogy.
The *hānaʀ-pronouns probably developed during the PN period but it probably coexisted with the older pronouns.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Ephraim wrote:The *hānaʀ-pronouns probably developed during the PN period but it probably coexisted with the older pronouns.
They where probably a kind of merger/mixture of the *hiz and *jainaz paradigms to begin with, but apart from runic swedish "eR" we dont seem to have any other exemples of the gothic related pronouns.
[:D] :se-og: :fi-al2: :swe:
[:)] :nor: :usa: :uk:
:wat: :dan: :se-sk2: :eng:
[B)] Image Image :deu:
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