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 shows _mit_ "we" sporadically.

Bottom line: The canonical Germanic V2 isn't the whole story, it seems.




/BP

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