--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "AThompson" <athompso@...>
wrote:

>
> Here’s the next instalment of Hrafnkel’s Saga.
>
> Thanks to Jöran and The Second Opinion for comments of previous

section. LN, I’m afraid the reference to Mr Burns went way over my
head and I´m not sure what I can do about the Unicode issue.


Sæll Alan,

Sorry about the baffling referrence! It was to the American cartoon
series The Simpsons. Actually I can read your posts alright if I
just switch to Unicode in the View menu of Internet Explorer, but it
gets a bit confused when I try to quote you in replies. Sometimes
the formatting goes awry at the end with all the spaces, or it runs
out of space--but I guess that wouldn't happen if I changed my
settings so that I get them delivered as emails, rather than going
to the Yahoo Groups website to read them. No criticism intended; I
was probably just too lazy to open a new window and check through
your grammar notes.

Hey, I've just comes across a bizarre example of a reflexive not
referring to the subject in Modern Icelandic. This is from
Sigurðsson "Long Distance Reflexives and Moods in Icelandic", quoted
by Gisella Ferraresi in "Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic"
as an example of a reflexive referring to some previously
established SELF, not necessarily the speaker.

María var alltaf svo andstyggileg. Þegar Ólafur kæmi segði hún sér
áreiðanleg að fara.

Maria was always so nasty. When Olaf came she would certainly tell
him to leave.

She quotes her source as saying that "given an appropriate context,
the (already established) SELF does not even have to be recently
mentioned." I wonder if there are any examples of this in Old Norse
and what limits there might be on when such a construction is
possible. This seems to be the reverse of all those examples of a
reflexive in a subordinate clause referring to the subject of the
main clause. Here the reflexive is referring from the main clause
to the subordinate clause.

Llama Nom