Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/393

Rh collection of legends generally named Cod. Burcanus (written a little after 1350) and Cod. Bildstcniamis (between 1420 and 1450), and the great Oxenstiernian manuscript, which consists chiefly of a collection of legends written for the most part in 1385. The very numerous Old Swedish charters, from 1343 downwards, are also of great importance.

Old Swedish, during its earliest pre-literary period (900-1200), retains quite as original a character as contemporary Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. The first part of the inscription of the Rökstone running thus—

and probably pronounced—

would, no doubt, have had the same form in contemporary Icelandic, except the last word, which would probably have had the less original form sun. The formal changes of the Swedish language during this period are, generally speaking, such as appear about the same time in all the members of the group,—as the change of soft R into common r (the Rök-stone runa R, later runar, runes; this appeared earliest after dental consonants, later after an accented vowel), and the change of sþ into st (in the 10th century raisþi, later reisti, raised); or they are, at least, common to it with Norwegian,—as the dropping of h before l, n, and r (in the 10th century hraur, younger, rör, cairn), and the changing of nasal vowels (the long ones latest) into non-nasalized. A very old specific Swedish characteristic, however, is the splitting up of i into iu before ngw, nkw,—as siunga, to sing, siunka, to sink, from primitive Scandinavian singwan, sinkwan (Icel.-Norw. syngva, søkkva). But the case is altogether different during what we may call the classical period of Old Swedish (1200-1350), the time of the later runic inscriptions and the oldest literature. During this period the language is already distinctly separate from the (literary) Icelandic-Norwegian (though not yet from Danish). The words of the Older Vestgötalaw—

would in contemporary Icelandic be—

These few words exhibit instances of the following innovations in Swedish:—d is inserted between ll (nn) and a following r (as b between m and l, r, and p between m and t, n—as hambrar, Icel. hamrar, hammers, sampt, Icel. samt, together with); an auxiliary vowel is inserted between final r and a preceding consonant; a in terminations is often changed into æ; a u in the final syllable causes no change of a preceding a; the present tense takes the vowel of the infinitive (and the preterite subjunctive that of preterite indicative plural). Other important changes, appearing at the same time, but probably, partly at least, of a somewhat older date, are the following:—all diphthongs are contracted (as ögha, Icel. Icel. auga, eye; dröma, Icel. drøyma, to dream; sten, Icel. steinn, stone—traces of which we find as early as the 12th century); é has passed into æ (as knæ, Icel. kné, knee); ia into iæ, as in Eastern Norwegian (as hiærta, Icel. hjarta, heart); iu into y after r, and a consonant + l (as flygha, Icel. fljúga, to fly); the forms of the three persons singular of verbs have assimilated (except in the so-called strong preterite); the 2d pers. plur. ends in -in for -ið, and the passive voice in -s for the earlier -sk; the dat. plur. of substantives with suffixed article ends in -umin (Icel. -onom, as sunumin, sunonom, to the sons). The transition to the 14th century is marked by important changes:—short y, e.g., passed into ö in many positions (as dör for dyr, door, &c.), and the forms of the dative and the accusative of pronouns gradually became the same. The number of borrowed words is as yet very limited, and is chiefly confined to ecclesiastical words of Latin and Greek origin, introduced along with Christianity (as kors, cross, bref, epistle, skoli, school, præster, priest, almosa, alms). At the middle of the 14th century the literary language undergoes a remarkable reform, developing at the same time to a "riksspråk," a uniform language, common to the whole country. The chief characteristics of this later Old Swedish are the following:—the long a has passed into å (that is, an open o), and io (except before rd, rt) into iö (as siö, sea, lake); at the same time there appears a so-called law of vowel balance, according to which the vowels i and u are always found in terminations after a short root syllable, and—at least when no consonant follows—e and o after a long one (as Gudi, to God, til salu, for sale, but i garþe, in the court, for visso, assuredly); g and k (sk) before palatal vowels are softened into dj and tj (stj); k and t in unaccented syllables often pass into gh, dh (as Sverighe for Sverike, Sweden, litedh for litet, a little); the articles þæn (or hin), the, and (a little later) en, a, come into use; the dual pronouns vanish; the relative ær, that, is changed with sum; the present participle takes a secondary form in -s (as gangandes, beside, gangande, going). A little later the following changes appear:—a short vowel is lengthened before a single consonant, first when the consonant belongs to the same syllable (as hat, hate), afterwards also when it belongs to the following one (as hata, to hate); an auxiliary vowel is inserted between l or n and a preceding consonant (as gavel, gable, öken, desert); short i, ending a syllable, passes into e (as leva, to live); th passes into t; a new conjugation is formed which has no infinitive termination, but doubles the sign of the preterite (as bo, bodde, bott, to dwell, dwelt, dwelt). Owing to the political and commercial state of the country the language at this period is deluged with borrowed words of Low German origin, mostly social and industrial terms, such as the great number of verbs in -era (e.g., hantera, to handle), the substantives in -eri (röveri, robbery), -inna (förstinna, princess), -het (fromhet, piety), be- (betala, to pay), and a great many others (klen, weak, smaka, to taste, grover, big, pung, purse, tukt, discipline, bruka, to use, tvist, quarrel, stövel, boot, arbeta, to work, frokoster, lunch, &c.). Owing to the political circumstances, we find towards the end of the period a very powerful Danish influence, which extends also to phonetics and etymology, so that, for example, nearly all the terminal vowels are supplanted by the uniform Danish e, the hard consonants p, t, k by b, d, g as in Danish, the second person plural of the imperative ends in -er, beside -en (as tagher, for older takin).

Dialectical differences incontestably occur in the runic inscriptions as well as in the literature; in the former, however, most of them are hidden from our eyes by the character of the writing, which is, from a phonetic point of view, highly unsatisfactory, indicating the most different sounds by the same sign (for example, o, u, y, and ö are denoted by one and the same rune); in the literature again they are reduced to a minimum by the awakening desire to form a uniform literary language for the whole country, and by the literary productivity and consequent predominant influence of certain provinces (as Östergötland). This question, moreover, has not hitherto been investigated with sufficient care. Only one distinct dialect has been handed down to us, that of the island of Gotland, which differs so essentially from the Old Swedish of the mainland that it has with good reason been characterized, under the name Forngutniska, as in a certain sense a separate language. Materials for its study are very abundant : on one hand we possess more than two hundred runic inscriptions, among them a very remarkable one of the 12th or 13th century, counting upwards of three hundred runes, cut on a font (now in Aakirkeby on the island of Bornholm), and representing the life of Christ in a series of pictures and words; on the other hand a literature has been preserved consisting of a runic calendar from 1328, the law of the island (from about 1350), a piece of traditional history, and a guild statute. The language is distinguished from the Old Swedish of the mainland especially by the following characteristics: the old diphthongs are preserved (e.g., auga, eye, droyma, to dream, stain, stone), and a new triphthong has arisen by the change of iú into iau (as fliauga, to fly); the long vowels e, œ, ö, have passed into i, e, y (as kni, knee, mela, to speak, dyma, to deem); short o rarely occurs except before r, being in other positions changed into u; w is dropped before r (as raiþi, wrath); the genitive singular of feminines in -a ends in -ur for -u (as kirkiur, of the church). Owing to the entire absence of documentary evidence it is impossible to determine how far the dialects east of the Baltic, which no doubt had a separate individuality, differed from the mother-tongue.

The first to pay attention to the study of Old Swedish was the Swedish savant J. Buræus (†1652), who by several works (from 1599 onwards) called attention to and excited a lively interest in the runic monuments, and, by his edition (1634) of the excellent Old Swedish work Um Styrilsi Konunga ok Höfþinga, in Old Swedish literature also. His no longer extant Specimen Primariæ Linguæ Scantzianæ gave but a very short review of Old Swedish inflexions, but is remarkable as the first essay of its kind, and is perhaps the oldest attempt in modern times at a grammatical treatment of any old Germanic language. The study of runes was very popular in the 17th century; M. Celsius (†1679) deciphered the "staffless" runes (see above, p. 370), and J. Hadorph (†1693), who also did good work in editing Old Swedish texts, copied more than a thousand runic inscriptions. During the 18th century, again, Old Swedish was almost completely neglected; but in the present century the study of runes has been well represented by the collection of the Swede Liljegren (†1837) and by the Norwegian S.