Hi Haukur,
Yes, that was a weak point, that I didn't document what
I meant by plurals. Here is the text again (for reference):
1 > Front: 8 goter ok 22 norrmen pa opdagelsefard fra winland
2 > of west wi hade lager wed 2 skjar en dags rise norr fra
3 > dena sten wi war ok fiske en dagh aptir wi kom hem fan 10
4 > man rode af blod og ded AVM fraelse af ille
5 > Side: har 10 mans we hawet at se aptir wore skip 14 dagh
6 > rise fram dena oh ahr 1362
Look at line 4.
He correctly writes "rode", where the -e ending
is the correct modern Norwegian adjective ending,
that is congruent to the plural "10 man".
BUT, in conformity with rodE, he should also
have written dodE. Because in the sentence
the 10 men are qualified by both of these adjectives:
The ten men are red as well as dead. Hence correct
modern Scandinavian would be:
Vi fant 10 mann rødE og dødE.

Instead of the form dødE, he does however
relapse into the English-sounding form DED. (=dead)


Another detail, that I regard as an error, is found in
line 5-6: vore skip 14 dagh rise fram dena
Here correct modern Scandinavian would have been
"våre skip 14 dagsreiser fra denne"
So "rese" ought to have been "reser/resor" with an -er
or -or ending, because "our ships 14 day-journeys from here"
calls for a plural of "journey".


Another point, that I didn't mention earlier, is that
(look here: http://www.dokpro.uio.no/perl/ordboksoek/
ordbok.cgi?OPP=reise&begge=S%F8k+i+begge+ordb%F8kene&ordbok
=nynorsk&alfabet=n&renset=j) the word "reise" is itself
a medieval import from Germany.

It is of course possible that it had already been imported
by the time of the Black Death (1350). But it seems odd
to me that the Gøtar and the Norrmen would use German terms
for such typical nautical terms as "days-journeys". After
all, the Scandinavians still had their own century-old
shipping traditions with all its own terminology. No need to
turn to the Dutch or the Germans yet. Such loans are
typical of the 17th century. Not the 14th. At least, that
is how it seems to me.

Best
Xigung

P.S. I was looking for an example of "day's journeys" from
the sagas, but this is all I came up with for the time being:
Þá er liðin váru tvö dægur sjá þeir land og þeir sigldu undir landit.

Clearly, in ON there is a differentiation between dagr and doegr.
The term used in the saga for sea-journeys is doegr. This must
have been the standard term used at sea in Old Norse times.
This also leads me to some helpful dictionary entries:
"doegr-far", "doegrafar", which must have been the terms
that ought to have been on the Kensington stone
-- if the author had had On reference books at his disposal;
but he didn't --




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

> Xigung wrote:
>
> > What was noteworthy to me, while I was translating,
> > was that the writer seems to have been unsure of
> > when and how to use proper Scandinavian plurals.
> > He seems to have been using English-style plural
> > endings here and there.
>
> I'm not quite sure I understand you correctly. The only
> thing that looks like an English plural to me is "10 mans".
> But this actually doesn't look strange to me as we do it
> in Icelandic: "10 manns" is every bit as natural as "10 menn"
> (different shades of meaning).
>
> Whether or not this was done in 14th century Scandinavian
> I don't know.
>
> Kveðja,
> Haukur