> > Slengr: Eiríkr Blóðøx ræðr, já.

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

> *ahem* Doesn't quite sound idiomatic to me :) I had no idea what this
> "ræðr" was supposed to refer to until I saw the English version. And

I

> have my doubts about adding "já" to sentences for emphasis. Does

anyone

> recall an example of that?

Thanks for the warning. I guess, in retrospect, I should have been
suspicious that it looked so much like the English! Any suggestions
for making it better? I noticed another bit where "Blandi and I"
appears with the plural pronoun 'vér Blanda' (rather than the
dual 'vit Blanda'), but after curiosities like Grottasöngr, I'm not so
sure that's impossible. To change the topic slightly, I came across
this article [ http://runeberg.org/anf/1892/0042.html ],
Personalsuffixet -m i første Person Ental hos norske og islandske
Oldtidsdigtere. Af Jón Thorkelsson, Arkiv för nordisk filologi / Ny
följd. Fjärde bandet. 1892. It discusses a few examples of -m and -mk
that are unambiguously singular and suggests that lines such as 'þótt
vér kván eigim' arose from a later misunderstanding of this ending as
plural.

Two explanations are suggested or implied: (1) that forms such as -um
existed in Proto Norse alongside -u in the 1st person singular
indicative (-m and -n forms are cited from OHG, OS and OE), and are an
Indo-European inheritance. (2) that these forms in ON are due to
suffixed dative pronoun *mez (ON mér) > *mz > m, + ek = -mk. Gordon
just mentions the use of the ending -um in the 1st person singular as
being the suffixed dative pronoun with full reflexive meaning "for
myself", and adds that the accusative -umk was suffixed in the same
way, and sometimes used for the dative. This being the origin of the
Middle Voice, of course. I'll see what Noreen says as soon as the
Germanic Lexicon Project is back online.

Llama Nom