Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/856

* SWEDISH LANGUAGE. 748 SWEDISH LANGUAGE. affix) ; thus Jlicka, 'girl,' flickan, 'the girl.' As in English, nouns have but one case (the genitive), which is now distinguished by inflection. The genitive ending is -s, which is appended after the article; thus flickans mor, 'the girl's mother.' Tlie plural of nouns is formed by means of the endings -or, -ar, -er, -en, to which the definite arti- cle is appended in the forms -iia, -iie, according to a feeling for vowel-balance which shows itself as early as the fourteenth century: thus flickorna, 'the" girls,' but dalarne, 'the dales.' A new pro- noun of address, ni, taking the place of /, came into the language in the seventeenth century and is now commonly used in books ; but in conversa- tion Swedish politeness prefers to avoid it and substitute the title of the person addressed, put- ting the verb in the third person; thus, or frun sjiik, 'is the lady sick?' = 'are you sick, madam?' The verb still retains the old Scandinavian pas- sive in -s, which was originally an affixed reflexive pronoun; thus, kalla, 'call,' kallas, 'to be called.' A more peculiar feature of conjugation is the differentiation of the perfect passive participle into two forms, one of which, called the supine, is used to inflect the perfect tenses, while the other is declinable and serves as a true participle; thus jag har iilskat, 'I have loved.' but jag ■dr alskad, 'I am loved,' and vi Uro ahkade, 'we are loved.' In the printing of Swedish the Roman letters have long since prevailed. Speaking somewhat roughly, the written language of to-day repre- sents the pronunciation of about two hundred }"ears ago; and as plionetic change has been at work during the interval, it is the case, just as in English, that the written form is often a bad index to colloquial utterance. Swedish print teems with 'silent' letters; thus, jag skal vara i staden, 'I shall be in the city,' is pronounced ja ska vara i stan; and livad ar dei, 'what is it?' becomes va a de. For the learner of Swedish one of the greatest difficulties is presented by its peculiar accent, which involves both stress and variations of musical pitch. Every word has either the simple or the compound tone. The simple tone is a rising modulation, while the compound (to quote from Sweet) "consists of a falling tone on the stress-syllable, with an up- ward leap of the voice and a slight secondary stress on a succeeding syllable." Not only the correct pronunciation, but the very meaning of a w'ord often depends on the exact modulation of its musical accent. BiBi.ioGRAPHT. For Old Swedish the leading authority is Noreen, AltschivediscJie Grammatik (Halle. 1897). He has also treated the subject in his Geschichte der nordischen Spracheti (Strassburg. 1898), a reprint of his article in the second edition of Paul's Grundriss. The great work on Swedish grammar is Rydqvist. Svenska sprdkets lagar (6 vols., Stockholm, 1850-83). A good small grammar is Schwarz and Noreen's Svensk sprdklara (ib., 1881). There is no good grammar in English. The best Swedish-English dictionary is that of Bjiirkman (Stockholm, 1880). The great dictionary of the Swedish Acad- emy, Ordbook iifver svenska spraket (Lund, 1894 et seq.), is only in the initial stages. On the sub- ject of the dialects consult Lundell, t^yare hid- rag till kmtnedom om. de svenska landsmalen, etc, (Stockholm, 1879 et seq.). An excellent account of Swedish pronunciation by Sweet is given in Ti-ansa-ctions of the Philological Hoeiely (Lon- don, 1877-79). The Literature. About 160 of the runic in- scriptions of Sweden, the oldest dating from the tenth century, contain alliterating verses evi- dently quoted from preexisting sagas. This and other lines of evidence show that the poetic ai't was widely cultivated in the Viking Age. But this 'literature,' which may have been compar- able to that presen-ed in Old Icelandic, is lost. By the middle of the twelfth century Christianity was firmly established, and the old pagan songs and sagas fell imder the ban of the Church, From that time on for five hundred years the national literature was dominated, rather more tlian else- where in 'estern Europe, by the religious spirit. The earliest writings that have come down in the Latin alphabet are certain codes of provincial laws (landskupslagar). The most important is the "Elder ^'est Gota Law.." dating from the thirteenth century. Magnus Eriksson's Land-slag (about 1.350) is that King's attempt to provide a common law for all the provinces he had brought under his rule. It t was probably a scholar from the entourage of this same King jMagnus who wrote the celebrated [7m styrilsi konunga ok hiifpinga ("On the Conduct of Kings and Magnates''). To the fourteenth century be- long the writings ascribed to Saint Birgitta, a pious nun and mystic revealer of heavenly things. There are nine books of her "Revelations." Saint Birgitta is the most eminent person- age in the annals of Catholic Sweden. She made the Convent of Vadstena a literary centre, where many Latin writings, chiefly mystical and hagiographie, but including a part of the Bible, were translated into Swedish for the benefit of the nuns. In poetry the mediaeval period is not very rich, though its aggregate of metrical pro- duction is considerable. The romances of chiv- alry are represented in the so-called Etifemia- visor, certain tales of knighthood done into Swed- ish verse by a gleeman living at the court of Queen Eupiiemia of Norway (1303-12). They are flerra hraii, Flcrtig Frcdrik af Xormandie, and Flores och Blan::aflor, all in rhyming couplets with four accents to the line. Besides these met- rical romances, there are several rhymed chron- icles, the oldest being the Erikskronika (abotit 1320), and the ballads. It is agreed that the ballad-making period in Sweden was in the thir- teenth and fourteenth centuries, but the extant collections are of the sixteenth and seventeenth. None of the kno^"n specimens are of indisputable antiquity, but the best coTnpare very well in form and matter with the better Kwmpeviser of Denmark. From the fifteenth century we have a few good poems bv Bishop Thomas of Strengnas (died in 1443). The Reformation transferred the literary centre from Vadstena to Upsala. The literature of the sixteenth century is almost exclusively religious, the two chief writers being the brothers Petri, Carmelite monks who had been converted to Lutheranism at Wittenberg. They stand out as the leading Swedish apostles of the new faith. The elder, 01a-us ('Master Olof '), wrote psalms, devotional poems, a prose chronicle of Swedish history, and (probably) the mystery-play Tohie Comedia. With his brother Laurentius he di- rected the publication of the first Swedish Bible