Old Swedish (Modern Swedish: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 until about 1526.

Old Swedish developed from Old East Norse, the eastern dialect of Old Norse. The earliest forms of the Swedish and Danish languages, spoken between the years 800 and 1100, were dialects of Old East Norse and are referred to as Runic Swedish and Runic Danish because at the time all texts were written in the runic alphabet. The differences were only minute, however, and the dialects truly began to diverge around the 12th century, becoming Old Swedish and Old Danish in the 13th century. It is not known when exactly Elfdalian began to diverge from Swedish.

Early Old Swedish was markedly different from modern Swedish in that it had a more complex case structure and had not yet experienced a reduction of the gender system and thus had three genders. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative.

Development

Early Old Swedish

thumb|right|A page of the [[Västgötalagen|Äldre Västgötalagen (Westrogothic law), a law code used in Västergötland, from the 1280s]]

The writing of the Westrogothic law marked the beginning of Early Old Swedish (, or ; 1225–1375), which had developed from Old East Norse. It was the first Swedish language document written in the Latin alphabet, and its oldest fragments have been dated to around the year 1225.

Old Swedish was relatively stable during this period. The phonological and grammatical systems inherited from Old Norse were relatively well preserved and did not experience any major changes.

Most of the texts from the Early Old Swedish period were written in Latin, as it was the language of knowledge and the Church. However, Old Swedish was used as a literary language as well, and laws especially were written in it; of the 28 surviving manuscripts from this period, 24 contain law texts. Much of the knowledge of Old Swedish comes from these law texts. In addition to laws, some religious and poetic texts were also written in Old Swedish.

Loanwords

The Catholic Church and its various monastic orders introduced many new Greek and Latin loanwords into Old Swedish. Latin especially had an influence on the written language.

The Middle Low German language also influenced Old Swedish due to the economic and political power of the Hanseatic League during the 13th and 14th centuries. Accordingly, loanwords relating to warfare, trade, crafts and bureaucracy entered the Swedish language directly from Low German, along with some grammatical suffixes and conjunctions. The prefixes , and that can be found in the beginning of modern Swedish words came from the Low German , and . Some words were replaced with new ones: the native word for window, , was replaced with , (kitchen) was replaced with and (to pay) with .

Late Old Swedish

In contrast to the stable Early Old Swedish, Late Old Swedish (; 1375–1526) experienced many changes, including a simplification of the grammatical system and a vowel shift, so that in the 16th century the language resembled modern Swedish more than before. The printing of the New Testament in Swedish in 1526 marked the starting point for modern Swedish.

In this period Old Swedish had taken in a large amount of new vocabulary primarily from Latin, Low German and Dutch. When the country became part of the Kalmar Union in 1397, many Danish scribes brought Danicisms into the written language.

Orthography

Old Swedish used some letters that are no longer found in modern Swedish: and were used for modern and respectively, and could stand for both (th as in that) and (th as in thing). In the latter part of the 14th century was replaced with and .

The grapheme could stand for both the phonemes and (e.g. (soul), in modern Swedish). The graphemes , , and were used interchangeably with the phonemes and (e.g. (without), in modern Swedish), and could also sometimes stand for the consonant–vowel combinations and : ( or dove).

Certain abbreviations were used in writing, such as for (modern , with). The letter combinations , and were often written so that one of the letters stood above the other as a smaller letter, , and , which led to the development of the modern letters , , and .

Phonology

The root syllable length in Old Swedish could be short (), long (, ) or overlong (). During the Late Old Swedish period the short root syllables () were lengthened and the overlong root syllables () were shortened, so modern Swedish only has the combinations and . Unlike in modern Swedish, a short vowel in Old Swedish did not entail a long consonant.

There were eight vowels in Early Old Swedish: . A vowel shift () occurred during the Late Old Swedish period, which had the following effects:

  • became ( > hus , house)
  • became ( > bok , book)
  • became ( > blå , blue)

The consonant sounds were largely the same as in modern Swedish, with the notable exceptions of and , which do not exist in modern Swedish (although the former is preserved in Elfdalian and to some extent also the latter).

The Modern Swedish tje-sound ([ɕ]) and sje-sound ([ɧ]) were probably and , respectively, similar to their values in modern Finland Swedish. A similar change can be seen from Old Spanish and to Modern Spanish and .

The Proto-Germanic phoneme was preserved in initial sounds in Old Swedish (w-) and did survive in rural Swedish dialects in the provinces of Skåne, Halland, Västergötland and south of Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is still preserved in the Dalecarlian dialects in the province of Dalarna, Sweden. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants (kw-, tw- etc.) in Old Swedish and did so into modern times in said dialects, as well as in the Westro- and North Bothnian tongues in northern Sweden.

Grammar

Nominal morphology

In Early Old Swedish

The most defining difference between Old Swedish and modern Swedish was the more complex grammatical system of the former. In Old Swedish nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative), whereas modern standard Swedish has reduced the case system to a common form and a genitive (some dialects retain distinct dative forms). There were also three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), still retained in many dialects today, but now reduced to two in the standard language, where the masculine and feminine have merged. These features of Old Swedish are still found in modern Icelandic and Faroese; the noun declensions are almost identical.

Noun declensions fell under two categories: weak and strong. The weak masculine, feminine and neuter nouns had their own declensions and at least three groups of strong masculine nouns, three groups of strong feminine nouns and one group of strong neuter nouns can be identified. Below is an overview of the noun declension system:

The noun declension system

{| class="wikitable"

! !! Masculine a-stems !! Masculine u-stems !! Feminine ō-stems !! Neuter a-stems !! Masculine an-stems !! Feminine ōn-stems

|-

! Sg.Nom.

| || rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | || ||

|-

! Sg.Acc.

| || rowspan="3" | || rowspan="3" |

|-

! Sg.Gen.

| || || ||

|-

! Sg.Dat.

| || || ||

|-

! Pl.Nom.

| || || rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | || || rowspan="2" |

|-

! Pl.Acc.

| rowspan="2" | || || rowspan="2" |

|-

! Pl.Gen.

| || || ||

|-

! Pl.Dat.

| || || || || ||

|}

In Late Old Swedish

By the year 1500 the number of cases in Old Swedish had been reduced from four (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative) to two (nominative and genitive).

Other major changes include the loss of a separate inflectional system for masculine and feminine nouns, pronouns and adjectives in the course of the 15th century, leaving only two genders in the standard Swedish language, although three genders are still common in many of the dialects. The old dative forms of the personal pronouns became the object forms (honom, henne, dem; him, her, them) and -s became more common as the ending for the genitive singular.

Adjectives

Adjectives and certain numerals were inflected according to the gender and case the noun they modified was in. Below is a table of the inflection of weak adjectives.

{| class="wikitable"

! !! Masculine !! Feminine !! Neuter

|-

! Singular nominative

| , || , || rowspan="2" | ,

|-

! Singular oblique

| , || ,

|-

! Plural

| colspan="3" | ,

|}

Verbs

Verbs in Old Swedish were conjugated according to person and number. There were four weak verb conjugations and six groups of strong verbs.

Strong verbs

The verbs in the table below are (bite), (offer), (become), (steal), (measure) and (go).

{| class="wikitable"

! rowspan="3" | !! colspan="5" | Singular !! colspan="5" | Plural

|-

! rowspan="2" | 1st person !! rowspan="2" | 2nd person !! colspan="3" | 3rd person !! rowspan="2" | 1st person !! rowspan="2" | 2nd person !! colspan="3" | 3rd person

|-

!masc.

!fem.

!neut.

!masc.

!fem.

!neut.

|-

! Nominative

| , || || rowspan="2" |

|

| rowspan="2" ||| || ||

| rowspan="2" |

| rowspan="2" |,

|-

! Accusative

| ||

||| rowspan="2" | || rowspan="2" | ||

|-

! Dative

| || ||

|

||| colspan="3" |

|-

! Genitive

| || ||

|

||| || , || colspan="3" |

|}

Numerals

The Old Swedish cardinal numbers are as follows.

:

Translation:

:Here we want to say with God's grace a few words about that holy God's martyr Saint Eric, who was earlier the King of Sweden. In both heritage and nobility he was fastly of royal extraction as other Swedish leaders. Since the realm was without a leader and he was beloved by all of the land's nobility and all of the common people, the commoners chose him as King with all of their good will, and sat him reverentially on the King's throne at Uppsala.

See also

  • Old Norse
  • Old Norwegian
  • Old Gutnish

Notes

Bibliography

  • Bergman, Gösta.Kortfattad svensk språkhistoria. Prisma 1980.
  • Kirro, Arto; Himanen, Ritva. Textkurs i fornsvenska. Universitetet 1988.
  • Noreen, Adolf. Altschwedische Grammatik. 1904.
  • Wessén, Elias. Fornsvenska texter: med förklaringar och ordlista. Läromedelsförlagen, Svenska bokförlagen 1969.

References

  • Altschwedische Grammatik by Adolf Noreen at the Germanic Lexicon Project
  • Old Swedish verb conjugator