Why Learning Old Norse > English or French

Comments

1. Wait, Old Norse is an OVS language? Those are damned rare, these days. Most of the modern Germanics are SOV at root, with transposition to SVO in declaratives.

   For the non-linguistics-geeky, by OVS, I mean that in basic clauses, the order is Object Subject Verb. “Óláf sees a wolf,” becomes, “Úlf sér Óláfr,” which, in terms of preserved word order, is more like, “Wolf[singular indeterminate accusative] is seen by Óláf[nominative].” Similarly we have, “Óláf vegr ormrinn,” meaning, “Óláf[accusative] is killed by worm[singular definite nominative],” or in other words, “The worm kills Óláf.”

   I’m wondering whether maybe this is actually an SOV, but with variable transposition for emphasis. (I know Latin has variable transposition; I forget what it is at root. I think SVO, but I can’t remember for sure.)

   PS: With an SOV language like German, if you lose the last page of a detective novel, you’ll find out who did it, who they did it to, what they did with with, and why they did it; but you never find out what they actually did!

   Posted by Auros on Jun. 07, 2008 at 6:19 PM [#]

2. Actually, according to Lesson #1, Old Norse clauses aren’t OVS or SVO or SOV. Word order is irrelevant; you identify the nominative and the accusative using declension only. “Óláf vegr ormrinn”, “Vegr Óláf ormrinn”, and “Ormrinn Óláf vegr” all mean the same thing.

   Posted by Evan on Jun. 07, 2008 at 6:44 PM [#]

3. According to the theory of generative grammer (which is the dominant linguistic paradigm, and has been for decades), Lesson #1 must be mistaken; every language has an inherent order, it just may have variable transposition available. Latin has a similar property (you can scramble the words to your heart’s content), but you can figure out the inherent order from cases where stuff like preposition binding and homonyms make arbitrary order become ambiguous.

   Posted by Auros on Jun. 08, 2008 at 11:05 AM [#]

4. Gah, where’s comment-editing when I need it?

   $comment[-1] =~ s/grammer/grammar/;

   Posted by Auros on Jun. 08, 2008 at 11:08 AM [#]

5. Ah. Well, the Icelanders who wrote that tutorial might be naive about the linguistics, or maybe they’re just oversimplifying for their audience. They probably know that we English-speakers aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. :) I do have the E.V. Gordon textbook on order — that’s been the canonical English/Old Norse textbook for many decades, revised multiple times. When it arrives, I’ll verify whether this is right.

   The other thought I had about this is — if you can freely rearrange verbs and nouns within clauses, that’s pretty exciting from a poet or singer’s perspective.

   Posted by Evan on Jun. 08, 2008 at 2:35 PM [#]

6. Auros’ P.S. about German reminded me of this Mark Twain quotation: “A German dives into a sea of nouns and emerges on the other side with a verb in his mouth.”

   Posted by Henci on Jun. 18, 2008 at 12:12 AM [#]