6 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
How much has modern Swedish evolved from Old Swedish? I speak Swedish but don’t really read or write it ever, so I’m wondering if it’s actually that much different (outside of the alphabet and certain spellings) or if it’s just something that would take getting used to.
Comment by Platypuskeeper at 02/04/2020 at 20:43 UTC*
15 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Classical Old Swedish (1200s-1300s) is different from modern Swedish in much the same way Icelandic is different. You still had use of grammatical cases, of three genders (m+f+n), of the subjunctive mood and plural verbs. Few loanwords (particularly from Low German ) had entered the language yet. And you had þ and ð sounds (although not systematically written with those characters, often 'th' and 'dh' were used, or þ for both, etc)
It's not as different as Icelandic is though, since Icelandic is West Norse language and Swedish is East Norse and the changes in sounds and vocabulary already existed by this point.
What makes it a bit trickier is that there's no standard ('normalized') spelling for Old Swedish. When people talk about how Icelandic is so close to Old Norse, what they mean by "Old Norse" tends to be not the language of the year 800 but Icelandic in 1200, the language of Snorri Sturluson and the sagas. And they don't mean those in literal form but the 'normalized' spelling of them, which is based off modern Icelandic spelling. (In the 1200s they didn't have accents to distinguish long and short vowels like the normalized spelling, nor did they distinguish þ/ð or i/j or w/v/u, so it was quite different) So although it's still true Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than Swedish/Danish/Norwegian, they do 'cheat' a little bit by harmonizing the spelling, even though the pronunciation is very different. (in spoken form, an Icelander would not immediately understand the Old Norse he could read well)
To compare; here are the first lines of Äldre Västgötalagen, as written letter-by-letter in Cod Holm B 59: (*klassisk fornsvenska*)
Her byriez laghbok væsgøta*. Krister ær fyrst i laghum warum.
If I were to write this with 'normalized' spelling based on modern Swedish (*nysvenska*) it would be:
Här börjas lagbok västgöta. Krister är först i lagum vårom.
Which is fairly understandable except that someone might read 'lagum' as being the same word as 'lagom'. Whereas in fully modern Swedish (*nusvenska*) the cases are lost (the nominative ending -er disappears off 'Krister' and the dative endings off "lagum vårom", and the word order requires tweaking):
Här börjas västgöta lagbok. Krist[us] är först i vår lag.
Contrast that to normalized Old West Norse, or 'standard' Old Norse:
Hér byrjas lǫgbók vestgauta. Kristr ær fyrst i lǫgum várum
Modern Icelandic is almost the same, apart from a change in pronoun:
Hér byrjas lögbók vestgauta. Kristur ær fyrst i lögum okkar
A good reader of Swedish has latent knowledge of the grammar though; plural verbs were used well into the 20th century. A lot of case usage is still in older terms ("ingen *dager* synes än" (nominative), "till *fots*" (genitive), "hvila i *herranom*" (dative)) and in dialectal/colloquial speech ("jag såg 'an" is the only correct way of saying that in Old Swedish as 'han' is the accusative. *Honom* was the dative but now serves as both)
So it's not as foreign as Icelandic, especially not if the spelling was normalized (which there's however no tradition of doing with East Norse). But there's still plenty of foreign words and grammar. Depends on how complicated what you're saying is. Viking Age rune stones tend to be so formulaic even the average Swede can read most of them if you just learn the letters and get a bit of practice.
(* Note BTW, that this hints that already 800 years ago, locals were not pronouncing the first 't' in *västgöta-* and *östgöta-* yet we're still writing them that way!)