Re: -e -a gender distinction in Swedish

> > den glöttig-e pågen, den glöttig-a tösen;
> > Kristian den först-e, Margareta den andr-a
> >
>
> I didn't know that was a Scanian thing?
>
> Actually, according to Brøndum-Nielsen, North Sjælland, which is
> closest to present Sweden, had only two genders. But in his story

of

> his life, the murderer Ole Nielsen Kollerød, the last to be

executed

> by the axe in Denmark some time in the beginning of the 19th
> century, distinguishes sharply and etymologically correctly,
> between 'dend' m. /deñ/ and 'den' /den/ f. "that (one), the".
>
> There's no f. in colloquial speech in Danish as in Swedish,
> no '... klockan, hon är fem' "the clock (time), she is five", it's
> all dialectal. I wonder sometimes how much the (imperfect) two-
> gender situation in Swedish is due to Danish influence in the

Kalmar

> Union times. I read somewhere that the orthography of Vadstena was
> very influential, the monastery of St. Birgitha who was a personal
> friend of the union queen Margaretha.
>
>
> Torsten

Well, I must by my own experience maintain that the alternance –e –a
is rather genuine in colloquial language in the west of Sweden, in
opposition to other parts, where the distinction is only maintained
in refined written language and the colloquial ending is generally
–a.
In Göteborg, for instance, where the tramway lines have different
colours on their signs at least older people refer to line 1 as "den
vite", 4 as "den gröne" etc. (-vagn being an old masc.).

I suspect that Själland would still have had this distinction if –a
hadn't been weakened to –e. If I have got it right from perusing
your past posts your theory is that the NW-block people were ousted
from Kattegatt-Skagerack to the Northsea coast by Germanics coming
from the Scandinavian peninsula. Is that correct?

How then to explain generalization to –a in Svealand and Norrland?
It can't be shibboletization so far from Denmark. Or is it due to
deep-rooted memory of the massacre in Stockholm 1520 staged by
Christian den andre (in Denmark also: den gode) ?


Lars