Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/477

 Reviews and Notes 473 that among children Floden would be used for a boy from Flod, the young son of Flod. Hence we may assume that, as here among children, the def. Floden is used for a boy from Flod, so among older equals, i.e., in the dialect of the community at large, Floden would refer to the older Flod. Or is this use not found at all? For an answer we turn to the construction: personal pronoun -f family name; here we find that ho Floda is equivalent to 'the wife of Flod.' In this form, then, the family name is to serve as namer for the wife by giving the name the feminine ending -a. Possibly Flod himself, then, would be spoken of as han Flod, perhaps neither han Floden or Floden. The examples do not make this clear. But as the definite ending is a designator of what is familiar, well-known to speaker and listener, and as the pre-positive pronoun is a somewhat stronger designator of familiarity, (perhaps also often with pejorative signification), it would seem that such a construction as han Flod would be about impossible. Under Adjectives, pp. 21-30 a case of incongruence may be noted. One says lefsa & godt (lefsa = plural) in place of lefsa a gotz, 'flat-breads are good.' Perfectly common is, of course, such incongruence in cases like the example: det e en annan ting og som (E syns a sa rart; and it is in just such cases (in the relative clause) that the neuter form of the adjective steps in, whatever the gender of the antecedent of the relative pronoun be. But already in the case of a plural antecedent the neuter form of the adjective establishes itself only slowly in the rela- tive clause. In the construction quoted, however, the use of the neuter adj. has gone far beyond this: the pi. noun is fol- lowed by neuter pred. adj. The intermediate steps are, of course (in Riksmaal form): lefser, det er noget som er godt> lefser, det er godt, finally lefser er godt. Under Attribution the discussion in the second paragraph of p. 25 is too sketchy to be clear. The author says: "Som vanlig i norsk folkemaal foretraekkes ofte en relativ saetning for attribu- tiv konstruktion ; saaledes regelmaessig naar adjektivet faar et tillaeg foran sig." If this is the case Tr. dialect has gone much farther than Nw. dialects in general, but possibly the statement generalizes more than it was intended to. The author cites the sentence: en skikk som e almindelig har i byen, as a case where the rel. constr. is necessary, for: 'en her i byen almindelig skik.' But this order, i.e., pre-position of the limiting adverbial phraze, is of-course quite foreign to Norwegian speech everywhere, it is regularly converted into a relative clause. Does the author mean that any modifier of the adj., also an emphatic adverb (meget, svczrt, 'etc.), necessitates the relative construction? The use of Pronouns, pp. 30-46, is discussed somewhat fully and excellently illustrated with examples. I note first that the