Re: Translation: Trolls and their Management

On Sun, 18 Jan 2004, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> At 04:53 18.1.2004, Tristan McLeay wrote:
>
> >_Troll_ is Troll /Su:/ in the nominative of _Trållen_, quite obviously a
> >(mis)translation of 'troll' (as in the ogre, not fishing), borrowed from
> >the same Scandinavian source.
>
> The spelling _Trållen_ looks quite funny.  Although
> "Standard Swedish" has /o:/ for _o_ in _troll_
> most dialects have /3\/ -- a phoneme that for some
> reason was excised from "Standard Swedish" --
> corresponding to Old Scandinavian short /o/.
Thanks for the info, and do point out anything else that seems odd if you
can, but I took Old Scandinavian short /o/ and Føticised it, which
involved making it a regular masculine a-stem (the default in Ancient
Føtisk and the only apart from neuter weak in Old Føtisk).  One of the
features of singular non-genitive masculine a-stems is that they're
shifted lower than the root (apart from /e/, which becomes /A/ instead of
/&/).

On the other hand, it probably makes more sense to borrow it as _Troll_
and have the plural/early genitive* have a stem of _Trull_; I guess it was
just borrowed early enough in Old Føtisk that the root was still the
plural form. This'd make the plural root /Swi:/ < [SyL]. (It will probably
take me some time to adapt to Old Føtisk, I'm so used to pulling it down
in the singular that pushing it up in the plural seems odd :)

* Old Føtisk regularised a lot grammatically; one thing that happened was
that the singular genitive got the singular root instead of the plural.

--
Tristan