We have stated that the language taught in this course is
"standardised" 13th century Icelandic. People using other material to
supplement this course (or using this course to supplement other
material) often find that their books do not always use the same
forms or spelling of the words. It is perhaps high time that some of
those variants be discussed.
First it should be stated that it is quite hard to "pin down" a
language as it was at an exact given form. We say that we're teaching
13th century language but that is not terribly precised - Icelandic
underwent many changes in the 13th century. Some of our forms may
even reflect early 13th century language while others mirror that of
the late part of the century. Perfect consistency is very hard to
achieve but we prefer to have some kind of standard. Thus our choices
are quite arbitrary here and there and will not exactly reflect that
of any other teaching material.
That said the interested student may find a discussion of variant
forms to be of some value. The variations can be grouped into two
categories.
1. Variations in space
We have already mentioned that the West Norse language forms are
different from those of East Norse. But how different are they? This
question is best answered by providing examples. One of the more
famous East Norse texts is "The Legendary History of Gutland". It
starts with those words:
"Gutland hitti fyrsti mathr than sum thieluar hit. tha war gutland so
eluist at thet daghum sanc Oc natum war uppj. En thann mathr quam
fyrsti eldi a land Oc sithan sanc thet aldri."
Translated word for word into English this produces: "Gutland found
first {a man} that who Thieluar {was called}. Then was Gautland so
{sensitive to heat} that it {during days} sank and {during nights}
was up."
Note that this is (more or less) the exact spelling of the
manuscript. No normalisation has been undertaken. This is in line
with the usual trend that Old Icelandic texts are normalised but
other Old Norse texts are not. This does make comparison with our
"standardised" language more difficult but we will attempt it
nevertheless. So here we provide those lines as they would look in
our Norse Course spelling:
"Gautland hitti fyrst maðr sá sem Þjalarr hét. Þá var
Gautland svá
elvíst at þat dögum sökk ok náttum var uppi. En sá
maðr kvám fyrst
eldi á land ok síðan sökk þat aldri."
Most of the differences are insignificant differences between
manuscript spelling and normalised spelling - but some of them are
quite interesting. Let's take a better look at those:
Old Swedish Old Icelandic
than sá
daghum dögum
sanc sökk
The word "than" is actually not as far from "sá" as it might seem.
The declension paradigm of "sá" is like this:
nom. sá
acc. þann
dat. þeim
gen. þess
In essence, what has happened in Old Swedish is that the accusative
form has been generalised to include the nominative. As a side note
it might be mentioned that the exact same thing happened in English.
This pronoun is the origin of the English definite article, 'the'.
The Old English paradigm was like this:
nom. se
acc. þone
dat. þám
gen. þæs
The "irregular" s-form was thrown out in favor of the þ-forms to
yield "the".
The next word on our list is "daghum", as opposed to "dögum".
First
we note that the 'gh' is the East Norse way of spelling the "soft" g
(see pronunciation guide). It also sometimes occurs in Icelandic
manuscripts. In any case the difference between 'gh' and 'g' is
merely one of spelling. The other difference is much more
interesting. Instead of the umlauted ö-vowel the Swedish text has
the
un-umlauted 'a'. This reflects a general tendency. The u-umlaut
effect, while remaining in full force in Icelandic up to the present
day, was weakened early on in the other Old Norse dialects.
The third difference is no less interesting. Instead of the Old
Icelandic "sökk" we have the much more English form "sanc". Again
we
have not an exception but a general tendency. The assimilation of
'nk' to 'kk' happened to a lesser extent in East Norse than in West
Norse.
There are many other, mostly small, differences between East Norse
and West Norse. One that might interest the English reader is that
West Norse dropped the 'v' in 'vr' clusters early on but East Norse
has preserved it to the present day. Where West Norse had "reiðr"
East Norse had "vreiðr" and Modern Danish has "vred". English has
preserved this consonant in its spelling but dropped it in
pronunciation. The English cognate is "wrath".
But how different is East Norse from West Norse? If you learn one
then can you read the other? The answer is a qualified yes. If you
are fluent in Old Icelandic you can read Old Swedish - but it will
take you some practice before you become fluent. Going from reading
Old Icelandic sagas to studying Swedish runic inscription is not a
very big step. Let's take a simple example. A typical runic
inscription from the viking age reads (transliterated):
(This stone has the "serial number" Öl 29, meaning that it is the
29th catalogued inscription from East-Gotland.)
The translation into Old Icelandic is very straightforward:
"Þorkuðr reisti stein þenna eptir Ingjald bróður sinn.
What differences there are are mostly due to the imprecision of the
runic alphabet. Swedish runic inscriptions are a rich field of study
but we will not go further into it in this course.
Old Danish is quite similar to Old Swedish. The differences are
probably too subtle to be appreciated by the readers of this course.
Now let us turn our attention to Old Norwegian. We already know that
Old Norwegian and Old Icelandic are collectively known as West Norse.
We might wonder what the key differences between the two dialects
are. For the student of Old Norse the most important difference is
that Old Norwegian texts are usually published in their manuscript
spelling - unlike Old Icelandic texts which are usually normalised.
For the linguist the difference lies mainly in the fact that Old
Icelandic is slightly more conservative than Old Norwegian.
One example where Old Icelandic is more conservative is in keeping
the 'h' in the consonant clusters 'hr' and 'hl'. Those were dropped
in Old Norwegian before the writing age. One stanza from the
Norwegian Rune Poem is as follows.
(A wagon is said to be worst for horses, Reginn forged the best
sword.)
You notice the alliterative triad reið-rossum-Reginn. This would
be
destroyed in translating into Icelandic since "rossum" would become
"hrossum".
2. Variations in time
No living language is static and Old Icelandic underwent many changes
from 1200 to 1400. The most major changes are the melting together of
ö and ø and of æ and oe. Both changes happened in the 13th
century.
ö + ø -> ö
æ + oe -> æ
Other noteworthy changes include the "softening" of final 't' and 'k'
in several common words. Thus:
ok -> og
ek -> eg
þik -> þig
þat -> það
hvat -> hvað
vit -> við
-it -> -ið (neuter article)
The absence of ø and oe and the "soft" consonants in the common
words
are the two features that can most easily be used to recognise Old
Icelandic from Modern Icelandic
The forms of many individual words changed with time according to
arbitrary rules; we have had to decide in each case which form to use
as our standard one. Our choices are not entirely consistant. In
cases where this course gives another form than other grammar
references you can rest reasonably assured that both forms are
correct - though one may be older than the other. A few common
variants are listed below.