Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Found this odd looking dative in Bishop Brynulf's bylaw.
dræpær i þæmmæ samfunþum

The kälve-stone in Östergötland has the <sunu>, when did become <sun/son>?

StiguR/StygguR gærði kumbl þau aft Øyvind, sunu sinn. Sa fioll austr

The Skern stone in denmark has a peculiar maðr form, similar to the mandr found in Ogut

Sasgærþr resþi sten, Finulfs dottiR, at Oþinkor AsbiarnaR sun, þan dyra ok hin drottinfasta.''
:B: ''Siþi sa mannr æs þøsi kumbl of briuti


Why is it that you often find forms like <dottiR> where there never was any /z/ but /r/ all along?
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Re: Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth wrote:Why is it that you often find forms like <dottiR> where there never was any /z/ but /r/ all along?
Analogy?
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:Found this odd looking dative in Bishop Brynulf's bylaw.
dræpær i þæmmæ samfunþum
There are a lot of strange forms of *sā(ʀ)si/*þessi, it seems to have went through a transition from internal inflection, *sā(ʀ) + *si, to mostly final inflection (like an adjective or pronoun) and there was a lot of variation on the way. This form is sort of analogous to the other forms in the paradigm with a doubled consonant (þetta, þenni~a~an, þessi etc.).
HinGambleGoth wrote:The kälve-stone in Östergötland has the <sunu>, when did become <sun/son>?

StiguR/StygguR gærði kumbl þau aft Øyvind, sunu sinn. Sa fioll austr
The loss of *ŭ is usually thought to have occured in the 9th century so the lack of it on that stone is an archaism (and it must really be a acc.sg form and not acc.pl *sunų).
HinGambleGoth wrote:The Skern stone in denmark has a peculiar maðr form, similar to the mandr found in Ogut

Sasgærþr resþi sten, Finulfs dottiR, at Oþinkor AsbiarnaR sun, þan dyra ok hin drottinfasta.''
:B: ''Siþi sa mannr æs þøsi kumbl of briuti
It may have been that the nn was analogically restored from the rest of the paradigm.
HinGambleGoth wrote:Why is it that you often find forms like <dottiR> where there never was any /z/ but /r/ all along?
There was a shift r > ʀ / i_ at some point. I think this, combined with the existence of ʀ-umlaut and iʀ-umlaut is the reason ʀ is sometimes thought to have had a palatal articulation.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:The loss of *ŭ is usually thought to have occured in the 9th century so the lack of it on that stone is an archaism (and it must really be a acc.sg form and not acc.pl *sunų).
I geuss the 9th century Norse paradigms would be much the same as in contemporary OE and OHG?

Rök has fjaru compared to Oic fjǫr, so, mjɔlŭk OE meolŭc, hjɔrŭtʀ OE heorŭt ŭ also drops in OE in these positions later according to Wiktionary.

What about ĭ?
Ephraim wrote: There was a shift r > ʀ / i_ at some point. I think this, combined with the existence of ʀ-umlaut and iʀ-umlaut is the reason ʀ is sometimes thought to have had a palatal articulation.
something like [ɹʲ], [ɻ] or [ʐ] ? some say it was a trill, but I have a hard time imagining that, since it was such a weak phoneme that easily dropped (as it already had in WG)
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Prinsessa »

Don't word-final trills drop as secondary developments much later (than the merger of *r and *z) all over Scandinavia, tho, in modern dialects? A trill dropping out feels intuitively easy to me at least.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Prinsessa wrote:Don't word-final trills drop as secondary developments much later (than the merger of *r and *z) all over Scandinavia, tho, in modern dialects? A trill dropping out feels intuitively easy to me at least.
But final *ʀ drops consistently in southern Scandinavia, in for instance the the a-declension, while *r does not, This happened a bit earlier in WG with complete loss, particularly in Ingveonic even in short short words.

But you do have a point, Oswe þēr and vīr become de and vi in later medieval documents.
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Re: Early old norse.

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HinGambleGoth wrote:
Prinsessa wrote:Don't word-final trills drop as secondary developments much later (than the merger of *r and *z) all over Scandinavia, tho, in modern dialects? A trill dropping out feels intuitively easy to me at least.
But final *ʀ drops consistently in southern Scandinavia, in for instance the the a-declension, while *r does not, This happened a bit earlier in WG with complete loss, particularly in Ingveonic even in short short words.

But you do have a point, Oswe þēr and vīr become de and vi in later medieval documents.
I know, but I mean dialects that actually retained final *ʀ, turned it into r and then dropped that r later, much more recently.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:
Ephraim wrote:The loss of *ŭ is usually thought to have occured in the 9th century so the lack of it on that stone is an archaism (and it must really be a acc.sg form and not acc.pl *sunų).
I geuss the 9th century Norse paradigms would be much the same as in contemporary OE and OHG?

Rök has fjaru compared to Oic fjǫr, so, mjɔlŭk OE meolŭc, hjɔrŭtʀ OE heorŭt ŭ also drops in OE in these positions later according to Wiktionary.

What about ĭ?
Yes, I think at least the nom.sg *meluk(s) would have regularly developed to *meŭlŭk but the other forms, like the acc.sg from PG *melukų and the dat.sg from PG *meluki I’m not so sure about. Syncope in medial syllables probably occured before syncope in final syllables which may slightly preceded apocope.

I write *eŭ and *eă, not *jɔ and *ja because I think they were short falling diphthongs in Early Old Norse.

There seems to be a hierarchy of unstressed short vowels in the development of Germanic, a>i>u where the vowels on the left drop more easily. This is best observed in Gothic where (if I remember correctly) short unstressed *a is lost in final syllables regardless of stem weight, *i is lost after long stems and *u remains after all stems. In the development of Norse, however, I think short *ŭ and and *ĭ are lost roughly at the same time (*ă is of course lost much earlier). If there is a difference, I think they would follow the hierarchy, though.
HinGambleGoth wrote:
Ephraim wrote: There was a shift r > ʀ / i_ at some point. I think this, combined with the existence of ʀ-umlaut and iʀ-umlaut is the reason ʀ is sometimes thought to have had a palatal articulation.
something like [ɹʲ], [ɻ] or [ʐ] ? some say it was a trill, but I have a hard time imagining that, since it was such a weak phoneme that easily dropped (as it already had in WG)
Perhaps, there are many possibilities. A palatalized alveolar trill or tap has been suggested, as has a Czech-style fricative trill or a voiced fricative. But there might have been a lot of variation over time and in different areas, just like there is a lot of variation in the pronunciation of /r/ in modern North Germanic.

I actually think trills can drop pretty easily due to the fact that they require a lot of effort to produce, but they are perhaps more susceptible to dissimilation (which we do see some examples of with *ʀ) than to unconditional loss. Another clue to the pronunciation is the opposite change ʀ > r after dentals.
HinGambleGoth wrote:
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.
Yes, I think the masculine nom.sg *eʀ~es (perhaps *iʀ~is) is the only certain form of PG *iz that is attested in Norse. I guess it~et could be from this source though. The paradigm could have partially merged with *(h)inn.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Prinsessa »

Ephraim wrote:regularly developed to *meŭlŭk
Never seen that one before. What other words confirm it's regular?

I'd spontaneously thought it was a breaking to *eă, then u-umlauted, but I guess the environment might not support that?
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

Prinsessa wrote:
Ephraim wrote:regularly developed to *meŭlŭk
Never seen that one before. What other words confirm it's regular?
This disyllabic form isn't actually attested in North Germanic, as far as I'm aware, it's just a reconstruction based on comparative evidence. As we've discussed earlier, unstressed short *ŭ in final syllables was often still unsyncopated in 9th century NG if the initial syllable was short, which is the case here. Compare OHG miluh, go miluks and OE meoluc. OHG and OE agreed with Early Old Norse in the syncope of short *u after heavy syllables but not after light. The Norse u-breaking is also evidence of an earlier *ŭ, although it doesn't tell us how long it was retained.
Prinsessa wrote:I'd spontaneously thought it was a breaking to *eă, then u-umlauted, but I guess the environment might not support that?
When it comes to breaking of *e, there are basically two main theories:
1. There was only one breaking, and the product of this breaking was later affected by u-umlaut in some circumstances.
2. There were two separate breakings, a-breaking and u-breaking, with different outcomes.

In practice, this is perhaps just a chronological difference.

If you only look at later Icelandic, the first theory may seem the most plausible because the outcome of a-breaking is ja and the outcome of u-breaking is jǫ/jö which looks just like the second a was affected by u-umlaut. But in other NG varieties, the outcome is different. In older Icelandic manuscripts, the second element is typically different from u-umlauted a and in Old Swedish, u-umlauted a is lost whereas u-broken e remains. Also, remember that the outcome of breaking was likely a falling diphthong at first, not a rising as in later languages.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Prinsessa »

I didn't mean I haven't seen the bisyllabic form (I'm well aware that the reconstructed PG form is *meluks). I meant the development of *e > *eŭ / _lV.
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Re: Early old norse.

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Prinsessa wrote:I didn't mean I haven't seen the bisyllabic form (I'm well aware that the reconstructed PG form is *meluks). I meant the development of *e > *eŭ / _lV.
There is *felu > feŭl, as seen in the MIc prefix fjöl-. This is the same breaking as *skelduz > *skeŭldʀ (OIc skjǫldr, FSw skiolder MSw. sköld), *meduz > *meŭðŭʀ (OIc mjǫðr, OSwe mioþer MSw. mjöd) or *erþō > *erþu > eŭrð (OIc jǫrð, OSw iorþ, MSw jord). The following *l doesn't block the breaking, but it also doesn't really cause it. The breaking is probably caused by the following *u although the exact conditions are somewhat controversial.

Also note how (Early) Old Swedish has io and Modern Swedish has (j)ö or (j)o, while the u-umlaut of *a is not regularly preserved.

Or if it's just my notation that's causing some confusion, see my earlier post about how I write the polyphthongs and my reasoning behind it:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4489&start=20#p178813
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Re: Early old norse.

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Ephraim wrote:I write *eŭ and *eă, not *jɔ and *ja because I think they were short falling diphthongs in Early Old Norse.
The actually smoothed into monothongs in some places, such as denmark, hence sialfer = selv and then you have siū = syv (pronounced syw). This is the opposite to the northern Scandinavian development with palatalization/assibiliation.

This is interesting if you look at old swedish, for instance you have ÖGL <gialda> as compared to modern swedish <gälla>, the same manuscripts doesn't write in <i> between velars and front vowels like later manuscripts. So i think the change "iæ" (with stress on the <i>) to "jæ" (with the stress on the æ) ought to have happened maybe in the beginning of the 14th century, later on the palatalization merged "jæ" with "æ" in these conditions.

So i reckon Oswe <sialver> was *siălver at least in the 13th century, at the beginning of the literary period.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:
Ephraim wrote:I write *eŭ and *eă, not *jɔ and *ja because I think they were short falling diphthongs in Early Old Norse.
The actually smoothed into monothongs in some places, such as denmark, hence sialfer = selv and then you have siū = syv (pronounced syw).
Many of the numerals can be kind of tricky to reconstruct for Early Old Norse.

For seven, East Norse seems to point towards *siɔu (OSw siu) which superficially looks a lot like OIc sjau but of course OIc doesn't preserve the triphthong otherwise. I don't know of any situation where a tautosyllabic OIc sequence jau would have developed regularly so I think that OIc sjau was originally disyllabic. As far as I know, *sjáu or *sjǫ́u is not attested, though. Also note MIc sjö.

I think the common Early Old Norse form was *seuų. I think the development was something like this:
PG *sebun
> *seŭƀun (u-breaking of *e)
> *seŭwun > *seŭun (ƀ > w before *u with subsequent loss of *w before *u)
> *seuun (lengthening of stressed CV > CVː)
> *seuų (nasalization)

Then Early Old Norse *seuų would have somewhat irregulary become monosyllabic in later North Germanic.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Prinsessa »

(and modern Faroese sjey with ey regularly < au, but you probably know that already)
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Image Runic/Early norse

Image Old Swedish

Image Gutnish

I reckon the Norwegian axe-lion would be most suitable for OWN.
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Re: Early old norse.

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The variation in presence of final –n is similar to the variation in –s, in that the endings have many origins. It's interesting that East Norse seems to have more –n-endings.
Prinsessa wrote:Isn't the Swedish -n in ögon simply analogous with the -n added to any neuter plural of a stem ending in a vowel (in the standard dialect) rather than an archaism?
I think it's the other way around. The plural –n is etymological in a few words such as öga and öra and it is from these that the –n was later extended to other words where it is not etymological, such as äpple and hjärta.

However, the early history of the Germanic n-stems is actually very complicated and much is unclear. There seems to be a lot of variation between the different branches. For example, North Germanic don't show the ablaut *augô–augini found in West and East Germanic. There was probably a lot of restructuring of the paradigms in the early period.

It's not quite clear what PG nom–acc.pl form of *augô was. Ringe (and Wiktionary) of course reconstruct *augōnō which explains Go augōna. The vowel u of OHG ougu and North Germanic ø̄ǥun/augu is slightly unexpected, though. I think the shift *ō > *ū > *u occured only word finally.

But there was probably a final long vowel *-ō in the PG ending, which explains why the nasal was protected in Swedish and not lost (presumably leaving nasalization) like in the other endings where the vowels was word-final in PN. West Norse would not have regularly lost the nasal anymore than East Norse, I think, but there may have been analogical restructuring in the opposite direction of later Swedish (as the n-plural was very rare).

It has alternatively been suggested that the West and East Norse forms actually reflect different pre-forms that was generalized differently in the different languages. See page 24 ff:
https://is.cuni.cz/webapps/zzp/detail/107309/?lang=en

OSw hiărta is a strange word by the way. It was declined like ø̄ǥa and ø̄ra in the singular but the nom-acc.pl was apparently hiărta and not *hiărtun (or *hiărtan). Icelandic hjarta obviously has nom–acc.pl hjörtu, like augu, so I have no idea where the Sw form comes from.
HinGambleGoth wrote:And retained -in as 3rd person imperative, that apparently spread to the present paradigm at some point, and later skipped from the verb to the pronoun I to make :swe: ni
I find the OSw –in-ending very puzzling. Do you have anything written about it's origin?

Did you really mean 3rd person (pl) imperative? As far as I know, there is no 3rd person imperative in Northwest Germanic. There is in Gothic though, and based on these forms Ringe reconstructs for PG 3sg *–adau and 3pl *–andau. It's not entirely unthinkable that a form similar to *–andau would lead OSw –in and be transferred to the 3pl subjunctive, I suppose. Cf. the past participle ending –inn in Norse but –ans in Gothic (this may be an ablaut difference as a few –ann are found in Norse).

Or did you mean the 3pl person subjunctive? Ringe reconstructs present *–ain and past *–īn for PG, and neither would have given us OSw –in. The nasal would have been lost (probably leaving nasalization), which is exactly what we see in OIc –i (of both the past and present). Also note that OSw doesn't consistently have –in in the 3pl subjunctive (as it does in the 2pl), it is often just –i like in Icelandic.

I notice that Gothic seems to have extended the 3pl and 1pl subjunctive with a final vowel, though, it has –aima and –aina. I guess that North Germanic could have optionally done the same for the 3pl subjunctive.
HinGambleGoth wrote:Oswe also had Þǿn corresponing to Oic Þau, Ogut had Þaun I reckon this nasal is analogical, much like the *R in ÞæiR
I think the *–u is indeed analogical to the adjectival declension much like the *–ʀ. I think PG *þō was simply extended with the adjectival neuter nom.acc-pl ending *–ō (> *ū > *–u). It may have been disyllabic *þɔ̄u (or *þɔ̄ŭ) still in Early Old Norse, like *þrīu (Ic þrjú) and perhaps *twɔ̄u (OIc tvau, MIc tvö) which show the same analogical extension.

The further extension with *–n in OSw and OGu is interesting. I think this may come from the demostrative *(h)in, so that it is originally *þɔ̄u in. There are other demostrative forms in OSw and OGu with an unexpected *–n:
http://runeberg.org/anf/1908/0198.html
HinGambleGoth wrote:This is interesting if you look at old swedish, for instance you have ÖGL <gialda> as compared to modern swedish <gälla>, the same manuscripts doesn't write in <i> between velars and front vowels like later manuscripts. So i think the change "iæ" (with stress on the <i>) to "jæ" (with the stress on the æ) ought to have happened maybe in the beginning of the 14th century, later on the palatalization merged "jæ" with "æ" in these conditions.

So i reckon Oswe <sialver> was *siălver at least in the 13th century, at the beginning of the literary period.
Like we've discussed in the Scandinavian forum, you're probably right, and there may have been an East–West dialectal difference in when the shift happened.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by HinGambleGoth »

I was thinking about the subjunctive, and i just looked at the Gothic form assuming it was related to Swedish -in.

The pronouns and demonstratives seem to have gone through considerable analogy in the daughter languages, borrowing from the Adjectives mainly. I reckon Gothic preserved the original Germanic set-up best, due to its age.

This process is still productive, for instance :se-og: inflects "den/det där" as an adjective, as "den där-a bilen", and the pronouns also change, for instance :swe: hans has gotten a double genitive s ending, yielding :se-og: hanses

There just seems to have been more dialectal variation within Norse than I expected.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

HinGambleGoth wrote:I was thinking about the subjunctive, and i just looked at the Gothic form assuming it was related to Swedish -in.
It is possible (and this is very speculative) that extended subjunctive forms existed in many early Germanic dialects in variation with the unextended forms (although they don't have to go back to Proto-Germanic proper, they may have been innovated and spread). Perhaps there were, for example, original *beraim, *beraid, *berain and extended *beraimō, *beraidō (?), *berainō (I have no idea where the extended vowel comes from and if it originally served any grammatical function). Gothic completely replaced original *beraim and *berain with the extended forms and perhaps the extended form of *berain survived in North Germanic, still in variation with the original unextended form in OSw.

It's slightly odd, though, that this form would have spread to the 2pl of all three moods and both tenses, completely replacing the original forms.
HinGambleGoth wrote:The pronouns and demonstratives seem to have gone through considerable analogy in the daughter languages, borrowing from the Adjectives mainly. I reckon Gothic preserved the original Germanic set-up best, due to its age.
Already in PG, the adjectives had of course mostly borrowed their declension from the pronouns (in other IE languages, they often decline like nouns) so it's not strange that the exchange between the two continued.

Gothic is conservative in this area but it does have the extended þata rather than þat and the analogously extended -ata adjectival ending.

When it comes to the nom–acc.n.sg ending of adjectives, I think that PG proper may only have had the t-less form *–a which of course goes back to older *–at borrowed from the pronoun *þat. However, final *t was lost in non-initial syllables which is why it remained in the pronouns.

The longer t-forms were later reintroduced in all Germanic branches, in analogy with *þat, but as it is hard to reconstruct a form that could underlie both the NG and EG forms, the reintroduction may have occured somewhat independently in the different branches. I think PN simply had *–at.
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Re: Early old norse.

Post by Ephraim »

As a note, I think that the early diphthongs *eu (from lenghtening of *eŭ) and *æu (from PG *aiw) may have been distinct, so I've updated the post on vowels:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4489&p=178813#p178813

I also don't think the earlier convention of an underdot to below nasals to mark nasalization of the preceding vowel was a good idea. If necessary, it's better to somehow mark the lack of nasalization as that seems to be rarer.
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