--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Haukur Thorgeirsson
<haukurth@...> wrote:

>
> The typical modern Icelandic forms are:
>
> langur hafsbotn
> langi hafsbotninn
>
> The following forms, while perfectly understandable, are probably
> confined to literary usage:
>
> hafsbotn langur
> hinn langi hafsbotn
>
> The latter is more common in the other Scandinavian languages;
> in Faroese we would have:
>
> tann langi havsbotnur (assuming 'havsbotnur' is a word)
>

To use a contemporary popular word, I must say thatHaukur is a bit
biased here. In Swedish, the form isn't

"hinn langi hafsbotn"/"tann langi havsbotnur"

but rather

"den långa havsbottn-en", (my hyphenation)

i.e., in Swedish one uses both the pronoun 'den' (cognate with
Faroese 'tann') and the definite article 'en' (cognate with
Icelandic 'hinn').

Dialectally things are more complicated. In Northern Sweden we don't
like the pronoun 'den' (actually, we don't have it in the pure
dialects) so we would do like this instead (using standard Swedish
spelling):

"långhavsbottnen"

which would be "langhafsbotninn" in Old Norse standardized spelling.
A funny thing is that Old Norse "hinn langi" (the long one),
Swedish "den långe", would become "langinn"/"lången" (ON/Swe st sp)
in Northern Swedish.

/Sjuler