THEORY Old Norse pronouns (was: Italian Particles)

At 09:24 19.4.2000 -0700, Sally Caves wrote:

Can you give a full-sentence example in Old Norse?

Of the use of pleonastic adverbs?  Really simple: there are a lot of
sentences like
        Nú fer skip á hafi_ "Now goes (a) ship on (the) sea"
        Þá fer skip..._
        Svá fer skip..._
where the adverb feels really redundant, every other sentence or so having
it.  Not very common among the greatest stylists, like Snorri, Njála or
Sturla Þorðarson, but very much in evidence in texts of less literary
ambitions.  It may be a feature of the law language, where these adverbs
frequently intruduce a new "paragraph" or example, but I don't think that's
the whole story.  Interestingly saga style has quite many examples of V1
sentences, where the sense is "and now something else happened:"
        _Sá konungr mann í blávu kápu, ok spurði hvort hann var kominn frá
Miklagarði_ "Saw the king (a) man in a blue cloak, and asked whether he had
been to Constantinople".
(I'm making these examples up en passant, but there are many authentic ones
if I only had the necessary books handy...).

There is also the construction found in ON verse, with enclitic pronouns:
        _veitk_ for _ek veit_,
        _veiztu_ < _veizt þú_ instead of _þú veizt_
                (_z_ = [ts] < /ts, ds, þs/),
        _veitumr, veitumt_ for _veitum_vér, veitum_vit_
                "I/thou/we.PL/we.DUAL know",
less commonly also 2.PL/2.DUAL _veitiðr, _veitiðit_ "you know", which is
all the more interesting since it is ancestral to the form actually found
in modern spoken Icelandic whenever the pronoun follows the verb:
[vEitIDI], tho written _veitið þið_ (_erið þið_ "are ye" even becomes
_erði_, which altho so written only as a conscious colloquialsim in dialog
is always so pronounced!)

In Eddic and early Skaldic vere there is also an enclitic negative particle
_-a_, which can be combined with clitic pronouns.  These constructions must
have become very fused in speakers' minds, since _veit ek a_ "know I not"
is often written _veitakak_, as if "know-not-I-not-I"!

Post-posed pronouns must have been common enough, since in many modern
dialects the 1.PL pronoun -- whether historically from plural _vér/vír_ or
from dual _vit_ -- shows up as _me_, having absorbed the _m_ of the verbal
ending _-um_, in spite of the fact that the pronoun is always preposed in
the modern dialects _me ve(i)t_ (also interesting: this occurs in the
western and eastern periphery of the mainland dialect area, but not closer
to the center).  Icelandic texts of the early modern period also
sporadically shows _mit_ "we".

Bottom line: The canonical Germanic V2 isn't the whole story, it seems,
which is interesting both in its own right and when developing a conlang
that is supposed to have split off from the influence of main North
Scandinavian developments.



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson
mailto:bpj@netg.se
mailto:melroch@my-deja.com
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