Re: Old Norse (was Re: New to the list)

At 06:02 17.6.2000 +0000, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:

>Forget the "herra". I don't recall seeing it in a saga. The setting of the
>sagas was more "egalitarian" than that of Feudal Europe at the same time.
>There were no peasants that had to say "Lord", "Sire", etc to bypassing
>knights so as not to have their heads chopped off (or was that Japan? :).
Yet _herra_ is used adressing kings in the latter part of Heimskringla!

>And Icelandic (and Old Norse) has an unusual way of positioning its
>negative, so the sentence would be "ek vil that eigi", or, more
>stylistically, "that vil ek eigi".
_Det vill jag inte_ is normal in Swedish too.  AFAIK all the Scandinavian
languages are semi-strict V2 languages with the negator following the verb
in main clauses and preceding it in subordinate clauses.

>:) Well, I was mostly referring to my Ecuadorian girlfriend, who, being a
>Spanish-speakers, finds imperatives rather uncouth. And I think she misses
>her 'usted', poor thing (in Iceland, any single person is "þú", whether s/he
>is the president, a worker, an infant, or a cat).
There is always þér, but if I'm to use that I'll use vér about myself!  In
Swedish the use of a plural pronoun to single people feels contrived and
snobbish; my oblique way of protesting is to use the royal we if so
addressed. :-)

Does anyone still use _séra_ as a form of address, BTW?

>As regards English, the
>honorific pronoun has overtaken the normal 'thou' (I know you know that). I
>see this as the single most annoying, confusing, and intolerable part of the
>language: failure to make a singular-plural distinction in the second person
>pronouns. "You guys" can't always cover the plural, as it's very colloquial
>and often inappropriate.
"You all" or "all of you" works fine.  I've also taken to use "they" as a
gender-nonspecific singular pronoun.  Mainland Scandinavians can use _den_
for that, fortunately.



/BP

  B.Philip Jonsson  mailto:melroch@mail.com
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