> Could you provide more information about this 18th century Spanish-
> Danish parleur? It is interesting.
It's maybe twenty years ago I read it somewhere. Possibly
Peter Skautrup: Det danske sprogs historie
> There might be a possibility that auslaut n and l after a short
> vowel might be interpreted as lh and nh (Portuguese graphemes)
> by a Spanish ear. Cf Russian rendering of Scandinavian l as
ль.
No, I'm pretty positive it was bona fide nY and lY. In those dialects
where all three genders survived, the deictic pronoun is denY, den,
det [de, deD]. Fynsk has monni (<- månenY), standard månen, "the
moon", solen, standard id., "the sun". In the short memoirs of
Ole Nielsen Kollerød, from Nordsjælland, the last person to be
beheaded by axe in Denmark, although he is a unpractised writer,
he is very consistent in distiguishing dend m. and den f. "it, the"
(that in spite of the fact thst Brøndum-Nielsen declares that
Nordsjælland is two-gender area; but he writes a century later).
The development nY -> n, lY -> l caused the collapse of the
masculine/feminine dichotomy.
Torsten