Some family terms in Ćwarmin

The basic family terms:

julo = son
ot = oldest son
zel = daughter

father =  aru
mother = viri

brother = raŋa
older brother = cawot
sister = zuja

In older Ćwarmin, possessive suffixes existed, but are used in very restricted contexts. However, in some lexemes, they appear as derivative elements of unclear meaning. Thus

-ata | -ete, formerly 1sg possessive

has lead to these terms:

raŋata ('my brother') = uncle
zujata ('my sister') = aunt
aruta ('my father') = grandfather
virite ('my mother') = grandmother

Apparently, parents referring to their siblings and parents has become a way children refer to their uncles, aunts and grandparents, and this was lexicalized. Other synonyms do exist, however. In addition:

aruta and virite are sometimes used as formal address to parents.
julata and zelete are used by some clergymen to refer to congregants.
cawata is used by some clergymen to refer to their senior clergymen.

The plural forms never have the possessive suffixes in use, as the morphological complexities for that has been largely forgotten. 'Otata', 'my oldest son' appears in some testaments and such.

Parents- and siblings-in-law also have forms such as 

raŋaś
zujaś
aruś
viriś

In some regions, second person suffixes (-aba/-ebe) are used instead of these historical third person suffixes. Why second or third person suffixes won out in different regions is unclear.

Detail #433: The Antideponent Verb

Let's for a moment consider the deponent verb. This is a verb which lacks morphologically active forms, despite being active. This might seem a bit weird, but let us have a look at some Swedish deponent verbs.

First, Swedish has a morphological passive, mostly formed by affixing -s to verb forms. (Swedish also has two periphrastic passives, but this is irrelevant for now.)

Here are some verbs which never appear without their -s:
andas (to breathe)
hoppas (to hope)
minnas (to remember)
låtsas (to pretend)
brås (to take after, to be similar to someone - in both cases due to family connections)

Some of these can take objects (granted, a minority). Andas can take the gas which is breathed ('breathe air', or, say, the aliens of Jupiter breathe methane - varelserna från Jupiter andas metan). "Hoppas" can take det ('that, it') as its object, signifying 'I hope so' (but literally 'I hope that'). Minnas can take any person or thing or fact as its object. Låtsas often is an auxiliary with a transitive verb under it.

In Swedish, these lack a past participle - but some do have a gerund (that morphologically looks exactly like a past participle; however, syntactical differences clarify that it indeed only is a gerund). I will warn against looking into lists of Swedish deponents, because some of them do seem to be just passives with slightly odd semantic shifts, or sometimes even just ... passives. The Swedish -s form also imho is not just a passive marker but also happens to be a reciprocal and an aspectual marker.

Other languages with deponents may have other restrictions - maybe all the deponents are intransitive, or maybe a verb is only partially deponent (i.e. deponent in, say, the participles but not in the finite forms).

Let's make up a set of features:

+ active syntactically
+/- transitive
-  active finite forms
- active infinite forms
+ passive finite forms
+ passive infinite forms
- can take agent adverb (e.g. the 'was seen by us' part)

Let's use these features to consider the antideponent.

Verbs such as 'boil' in English seem to permit somewhat similar behaviors, i.e. they can be passive in meaning (or active), thus passive syntactically is partially true. However, English does have active finite and infinite forms for boil, i.e. 'to be boiled' and the participle 'boiled' itself. The active form, 'boiling' interestingly enough does serve to convey the passive meaning of 'being boiled' as well. It cannot, however, take the agent:
the egg is boiling by me is wrong, I'm boiling the egg is acceptable.

Let's inverse the above table fully:

- active syntactically
+/- transitive
+ active finite forms
+ active infinite forms
- passive finite forms
- passive infinite forms
+ can take agent adverb

The interesting bit here is the +/-transitive, and I think that's where we could distinguish this from run off the mill split-ergativity, where some verbs just happen to have an ergative-like behavior. If we restricted this so it only ever happened with intransitives, and the actual subject was demoted to agent adverbial, whereas the subject either is empty or a dummy pronoun, this is getting us into some interesting ground.

Another option is just simply having these as a sort of lexical restriction: these verbs just don't do passive. I think English maybe actually might have some of those even beyond the auxiliaries?

A further option is of course to take something like English 'I broke the window' but only permit these two options:

The window broke.
The window broke by me.
*I broke the window.

Once more voices are involved, some interesting options emerge, such as gaps in the voice paradigm for verbs.

Detail #432: Generalized Wh-movement

Wh-movement tends to come in two forms in conlangs, as far as I can tell: English-like or wh-in situ. Let's consider some other options! This post was inspired by some questions in the conlang mailing list.

1. Wh-at the end

There are, apparently, some reasons to consider this highly unlikely in languages. OTOH, it might not be entirely unattested.

2. Wh-in wackernagel

The Wackernagel position, i.e. the second word in a clause, seems a rather natural option.

3. Wh-next-to-verb

Both the position after and before the verb seem to make sense as possible attractors for the interrogative pronoun.

4. Discontinuous wh

There are further complications we can consider, such as discontinuous-wh. I find this most likely for two types of interrogatives: determiners and adjectival interrogatives ('what type of a', 'yes/no-query determiner', 'which', 'of what qualities', etc).

These actually occur in some Slavic languages with interrogatives like "kakoj" and "kotoryj". 

Anyways, discontinuous-wh can probably be combined with any of the three previous forms, and in different ways - maybe the head noun is moved instead and the wh remains? Maybe vice versa. Different movements for both parts of the interrogative noun phrase seems unlikely, but parts of the noun phrase may well be pulled along with the interrogative particle.

Let's imagine "Q" is an interrogative particle that forms a yes/no-question focused on the noun it belongs to. Congruence makes it clear it pairs with "house" in this imagined language, marked by roman lowercase numerals picked at random. We can now imagine that Q pulls along pertinent 'factors' along with it:

Q.iii red.iii you saw house.iii?
did you see the red house?

Verbal interrogative markers seem somewhat more likely to be discontinuous - just consider the English polar question.

Relative Clauses in Dairwueh

 I have previously given a short introduction to relative clauses in Dairwueh. Let's up the ante a bit.

Resumptive pronouns in relative attributes

Since the relativizing verb does not carry (much) information about the syntactical role that the referent has in the subclause, resumptive pronouns are often used. Some dialects and varieties of Dairwueh have a resumptive pronoun stem ner- (from a historical nez, the fricative popping back in some forms). Most use the neuter pronoun stem, but inflected for gender - the capital literary form specifically uses the t-stem version of the nominative and accusative.

A peculiar thing about the resumptive pronoun is that it can even be used for the subject of a subsequent subclause, as if this were how to form two subclauses in English:

the man who plays the guitar and he sings.

Weird restriction

Consider an utterance like 'don't reject applicants for being too boring'. In English this cannot be rephrased as 'don't reject applicants who are too boring', since this alters the meaning significantly. A strict reading has the rephrasing signify that no one that is too boring must be rejected, whereas the first only means that boringness must not influence the decision.

In Dairwueh, use of the irrealis form of the subordinating verb is used, among other things, for this particular structure.

The irrealis form can also be used to communicate a purely irrealis subclause, e.g. 'those who would do so-and-so'. To enforce the "purely irrealis" reading, a resumptive pronoun is used. To enforce the purely 'for being X' reading,the subordinate verb may be irrealis instead of infinitive - or in some varieties, a demonstrative pronoun is placed before the relative verb.

Finally, the irrealis form of the relative verb can also express an indirect question: I wonder the men who will sing -> I wonder whether the men will sing.

Use of the interrogative pronoun before a relative subclause requires irrealis in some dialects, and requires irrealis for present tense in many dialects.

Adjectives have a similar function as well when using the irrealis participle marker e-...-šis on them.

Things I would like to research or develop

A while ago, in a post I said something like "more research required" regarding a particular feature of Swedish grammar. This made me think of things I'd like to research, but which I probably never will. These would all be at least somewhat original research.

Linguistics

A variety of tiny syntactical and typological questions that have occurred to me over the years:

• Does the Swedish relative pronoun or relativizer "som" permit exceptional coordination over gaps?
• How uniform are the rules for partitive-vs-accusative among speakers of Finnish?
• What case do speakers of Swedish prefer for the complement of a copula in contexts where the subject of the copula is a non-subject syntactically? ("We will let you be you").
• How does congruence and number work in coordinated-over-gaps compounds in Swedish?
• Do speakers of English naturally prefer the accusative for complements of the copula? I am pretty sure that examples like "it is difficult to be me" and a few others showcase that accusative in fact is the natural case that everyone prefers, and that most "it is I"-speakers have a cultivated and artificial case selection that fails whenever a single complication arises. The test could be one of "select the correct case" with sentences with a gap, and measuring response times. Needs to start out with simple clauses and progress into increasingly long ones, with some of them there only to be able to calibrate for expected response time. Comparably complex structures also need to be used.
• Syntactical differences between standard Finland Swedish and middle  Ostrobothnian.
• Figuring out the full set of sound changes of Björkö dialect. (Conlang idea: apply all these sound changes to late proto-norse and create a 'fully björkö' dialect.)
• How common is it for existential statements to have quirks in terms of congruence, case marking, word order, ...)
• To what extent are 'than' and 'as' (and 'än' and 'som' as element of comparison) objectively speaking prepositions in the grammars of speakers of English and Swedish - even among those who claim they exclusively are conjunctions.
  
• To what extent can we find evidence that the rule against definite form after 'denna/detta/dessa' in prescriptivist Swedish is made-up to spite southern and southwestern Swedes?
• Swedish has two patterns for forming "this": "denna" and "den här". (Both are further inflected for gender and number.) 'Den här' is always followed by the definite form of the adjective as well as the definite form of the noun. 'Denna' is - in prescriptive usage - followed by definite adjectives but indefinite nouns.
• In texts predating the middle of the 18th century, you find variation on this: both the definite and indefinite noun are used in the nominative. (Other cases only take the definite.)
• 'Denna' is predominantly used in the south and southwest, 'den här' is predominantly used everywhere else.
• "denna + indef" quickly gains ground in books printed in the "den här"-area towards the end of the 18th century, and basically becomes mandatory in writing in the 19th century, but "denna + def" never goes extinct in the south and southwest.
• There seems to be at least some 18th century correspondences between publishers that hint at this actually being an intentional change to turn southern Swedish "wrong".
  

Theology

• It is my firm belief that even many apparently philosemitic Christian clergymen in their sermons plant the seeds for antisemitism. The research would require the following steps:
  
  Finding a corpus of sermons and sermon-like texts that in one way or another discuss Judaism and the Jews, and their role and their beliefs from a Christian p.o.v. In this corpus, statements that misrepresent Jewish beliefs in ways that may lead to negative perceptions about Judaism, and statements that use Jews as a negative example - when similar negative examples can be found within Christianity itself - have to be found, and the "actual" fact about Judaism needs to be verified. (Examples: does Judaism teach that all who are born non-Jewish will automatically burn in hell? I have heard this claim from Christians. I know it is false. It is often presented in order to prop up certain Christian dogmas and to make Christianity seem the compassionate alternative.)
  
• The way in which such mistaken statements nurture antisemitism needs to be evaluated in some way, and the effect on listeners - both believers and non-believers alike - need to be estimated. 
• Some measure as to how common this is would either reassure me that it's just a few bad apples, or confirm my own experience that it's fairly common.
  
• it would also interest me to research the use of fabricated Jewish traditions to prop up Christian theology. It is not entirely uncommon for Christian preachers to claim that there is an ancient Jewish tradition about so-and-so, and this tradition explains some detail in the NT or even later Christian traditions. Sometimes it might hold up, most of the time it doesn't.
  

• It would greatly interest me to find examples of humour in the Bible, in the Talmud, in the midrashes and targums, in the baraitha literature, and even in more general literature from ancient Mesopotamia - that have failed to be identified as humour. I am convinced that the cultural gulf between modern humans and those of antiquity is so great that we may fail to appreciate just how some of the statements in the literature mentioned above very well may been intended as jokes to convey some point. Many Jewish scholars - and even fairly "average yeshiva-level" students seem to be aware of some of these jokes, but secular scholars often seem to fail to spot such jokes. I am not saying this is a universal problem, but I get the impression that there may be a fair share of humour that no one's identified as such. It is not inconceivable that greek philosophers as well have jokes that have been missed.
  

Music

• Tymoczko has (and possibly other theorists have) identified that modulation and chord progressions are very similar phenomena. He doubts that listeners could manage keeping any kind of track of a third similar level. Using, say, pentatonic scales embedded in diatonic scales embedded in uneven extended meantone chromatic scales could provide a way of creating exactly that structure. Extended meantone chromaticism could also be used for extending the chord_progression-modulation complex to a chord_progression-modulation-metamodulation complex.
• What kind of notion of "keeping track of" do we have in mind?
• To what extent can listeners appreciate functional harmony using isoharmonic triads that are not predominantly 4:5:6 (and its utonal version). Do they need to be rooted at powers of 2? Does 8:11:14 do a better job  than 6:7:8, 7:9:11, 7:10:13 or 9:11:13 because 8:11:14 is rooted at 2³? How important is root motion of 3/2 (i.e. by perfect fifths)? (I believe the tritone substitution G7 → C 🠮 G7 → F# shows that a root motion of a fifth is not necessary.) (Normally, the tritone substitution is given from p.o.v. of the tonic, so G7 → C 🠮 Db7 → C, but sometimes, it's good to think of it in other ways as well.)
• Can asymmetric chords in the wholetone scale help facilitate a functional tonality in it?
• Temperaments such as mavila warp familiar relationships. Can this warping be 'eased in' by modulating into successively more warped regions of a very warped temperament while fully maintaining the relationships - i.e. the relation between root and third still feels as though it passes through the cycle of fifths in the same way?
  
• Figuring out how to use sus4-chords as an extension to normal harmonic praxis? (Notice the - not♯.) Other uses of quartertones as subtle additions to harmonic praxis are also of some interest.
  
• Can we somehow formalize the "similarity" between the use of chords in functional harmony and jins in maqam?
  

 Maths and CS

• How well can games make players get used to weird geometries and topologies?
• Can a player discern things about the geometry of a game from hearing warped intervals in the music that directly correspond to the geometry? 
• Comparing the complexity of a variety of geometrical problems in different types of geometries.
  

Design of things

• A string instrument with plastic frets ('fishing line'). The frets are attached to two beams that are easy to attach to the neck. At least one of the beams needs to be small enough to fit under the strings.
  

Software design:

• Some cursed versions of gomoku.
• Improve my pitch perception practice app
• Some basic topology/geometry toolkit, especially with the intention of visualizing some of the topologies and geometries present in microtonal theory
  
• A set of scripts that utilize some sound change applier and git to make managing multiple a priori conlangs easy. (Separate repos for sound changes, for input vocabulary, and for output. Also, the sound change applier can parse certain extra commands for splitting a language, for borrowing vocab from a different language at some particular step, etc)
  
• An AI for writing microtonal harmony and counterpoint.
• A duolingo-like web engine for conlangers to use.
• Some games that utilize weird topologies and such.
• A game with very forgetful terrain generation
  

A Conreligious Practice: Alphabetic Thread Manipulation

Among some of the more ritualistic Bryatesle-Dairwueh religions, a devotional practice involving strings of wool and the hand has developed.

Strings (regionally, this varies from ribbons of about half an inch width to actual strings) are wrapped around the hand in order to imitate the shapes of letters.

Words are written through repeated application of this. This is done in order to emphasize important words in a prayer or meditation. Very few would write an entire sentence this way, but sometimes, groups collaborate in writing full hymns on their hands.

Varieties

The first  main difference is between ribbon-users and string-users. Naturally, ribbons and strings behave slightly differently, with ribbons not permitting quite as sharp 'turns', thus leading to significant differences in the notional 'fonts' they use.

Not a single tradition tolerates both ribbons and strings; they all are strictly one or the other. All manner of justifications for their favoured type exist. Their opinion of the other group is not violently hostile, but always somewhat negative. However, negative opinions may exist between different groups that share the ribbon (or string), and sometimes over purely technical details: linen vs. wool, blue vs. red, patterned or plain ribbon, woven or crotcheted ribbons, single thread or three threads? All threads of the same colour or different colours?

Ribbon-users tend to have different colours on the two sides, and they may consider which side is visible to be of some importance. Ribbons can also use folds that are difficult to form with strings. Strings can have tighter loops.

Weaving beneath and above fingers, forming angles, using the palm, etc are all parts of this. Both sides of the hand are used in some varieties, whereas in some, only one side is used.

In some traditions, letters are also tied with strings around the hands of the dead, usually one letter on top of the other, so that the outermost letter is the first letter of the word. Which words are used tends to vary strongly.

Really strict beliefs

Although these practices are far from universal, in some areas they are considered important. Special importance is ascribed to the letters tied on the hands of the dead, and they are often considered passwords for the afterlife. (The tradition, however, rather seems to have originated as a way of conveying messages to angels and relatives and God himself, rather than as passwords.)

This of course may cause problems for people who lose a hand or who have lost fingers. Losing a hand in such a way that the hand is physically 'available' often leads to performing this ritual before burying the hand. Some traditions are strict about which hand the letters should be formed on, and so losing 'the other hand' may be less important. In traditions where which particular hand it is doesn't matter so much, it still happens that people bury the first hand with letters in case the other were to be entirely lost in the future.

Loss of fingers may also cause issues, and grafting wooden sticks into the hands of the dead as a solution occurs. Entire wooden hands are sometimes used.

Further developments

Hand-shaped growths on trees sometimes get similar words tied o nthem. These are not of a sign-post nature (signposts are either cut out or chiseled or some other method), but purely ritualistic. Such growths are sometimes also buried as a message to the other side.

Detail #431: A Strategy for making Unreliable Morphology

Consider a system - maybe case, something else - where -n is e.g. a case marker. However, it is also a marker similar to the -n in English a/an.

Thus

I bought an car (an = acc)
a car is parked in my spot

but

I bought an apple
an apple a day keeps the doctor away

So, the only situation in which the case is visibly marked is whenever 'a' stands before a consonant. One could imagine a similar thing for, say, some marking on verbs (maybe plural marking or some tense marking on some verbs).

Real Language Examples: Traces of the Old Swedish Case System in Modern Swedish

övermåttan - exceedingly, over the measure(acc)
an example that well describes this essay.

Traces of the Old Swedish Case System in Modern Swedish

This article is mainly written as a potential source of inspiration for conlangers, especially those whose focus lie with naturalistic constructed languages. This comes with a caveat emptor: claims here may be incorrect. I have gone to some effort to verify stuff, but mistakes may have slipped by. With some additional effort on the part of the reader, it could perhaps suffice as a scholarly source. However, paradigms for Old Swedish, Old Norse and Old English are largely taken from wiktionary. Information about the extant or recently extinct case systems in dialects are hard to find reliable sources for.

I know of no previous list of all remnants of the case system in Swedish, and writing this has been kind of annoying. Every time I've thought I've had it entirely covered, an expression I haven't used for years rears its head, some expression in the newspaper catches my attention, I say something and realize one second later that it's yet another example, I hear someone speaking dialect come up with yet another example, ...

Swedish, much like English, has lost the old Germanic case system rather thoroughly. Both languages retain one case distinction - nominative vs. genitive, where the nominative mostly has taken over all the roles of the dative and accusative, but also partially some roles that the genitive previously has had. This is an interesting opposite to modern German (and Älvdalska) - where the genitive was lost but the others kept.

Unlike English, however, Swedish does keep a fair few traces of the dative and accusative, as well as a somewhat more robust trace of the genitive's previously wider function. Whether to consider the genitive a case or not in English and Swedish is tricky, but there may be slightly stronger reasons for doing so in Swedish.

Let's first quickly review the case system of modern Swedish, and contrast it with the case system of Old Swedish. The developments should be familiar to anyone with any knowledge of English historical linguistics. Several of my statements below are from this source.

Old Swedish and Case 

Old Swedish had a typical Germanic four case system: nominative, dative, accusative, genitive. The case system was never fully distinct, i.e. some case syncretism has always existed, at least for some cases in some genders. Oftentimes, only adjectives and articles would mark for case (much like modern German!), and these markers seem to have survived for longer than markers on the noun itself. The syncretism naturally also had less of an impact in any noun phrase were multiple words had different patterns of marking present on them, as the actual intended case in some sense could be triangulated from the noun and adjective markers.

    Morphology 

A complication that is shared with German, is that case morphology on adjectives varies by certain parameters (strong vs. weak, which mainly correlates with indefinite vs. definite). In addition, case morphology for definite nouns differed from indefinite nouns, and you get a wild variety of declensions with their own peculiarities. Definite nouns and indefinite adjectives carried the main load of case morphology.

 

There is an appendix at the end detailing the Old Swedish nominal and adjectival morphology. A detailed knowledge of it is not necessary to understand the remainder of this article. Besides, throughout the decline of the case system, it is fairly likely all manner of modified versions existed for short time-spans or regionally. Besides, we do also find changes between Old Norse and Old Swedish, where nouns change conjugation or whole conjugations change a bit. Largely, the system was preserved, but details did change.

The adjective morphology was in some sense simpler than the nominal morphology - almost all adjectives behave the same way all the time, using the same morphemes, etc.

Syntax

Much like in pretty much all other Indo-European languages ever, each preposition took some particular case, and the cases also sometimes affected the meaning of the preposition. It is hard (or expensive) to come by information on this. We should probably talk of adpositions rather than prepositions in Old Swedish and Old Norse, since they were much more frequently used as postpositions than they are today. Today, this nearly exclusively survives in a few fixed expressions.

Genitive expressions were originally head-initial, but this probably changed during the course of Old Swedish. Remnants of the postposed possessor still occurs with possessive pronouns even in the written language, but is increasingly considered dialectal. Swedes in Sweden really don't like anything actually conservative in the written language ever, and thus this will probably go extinct soon enough.

In properly old Norse, we find quirky case. A possible trace of this, somewhat similar to English 'methinks', is 'det ante mig'. Ana = suspect, perceive, but somewhat at the edge of perception. In modern Swedish, this structure would be a slightly malformed "It suspected me", but signifying 'I knew it!' (In modern Swedish, 'ana' is 'anade' in the past tense, not 'ante'.)

We find in Old Swedish that the genitive can be used as an adverbial case, i.e. it is not restricted to adnominal and adpositional usages. Many modern retentions of the old genitive in fact reflect such usages, and this is often evident with a variety of adverbs pertaining to time or manner.

Modern Swedish and Case

Morphology

Modern Swedish has nominative vs. oblique solely in the pronouns - with possessives formed either as genitives or as possessive adjectives. This is somewhat similar to English. The noun is - like in English - simpler, having the nominative and the genitive, which is nearly invariably marked by -s*. The pronominal oblique is used after prepositions, before postpositions and as objects of verbs.

Nouns generally, but not always, correspond to the historical nominative form. A few exceptions where historical obliques won out exist. Modern nouns have one case-like marker:

-s is a clitic that goes on the last word of the NP that is the possessor. Thus "kungens halspastiller" ('the throat lozenges of the king'), kungen av Danmarks halspastiller ('the king of Denmark's throat lozenges'). A few conservative speakers and writers may prefer an older order where "the king's of Denmark throat lozenges" hold.**

The possessive suffix goes on the end of any inflected form of the noun, in an invariant form. It may not go on a stem if the stem deviates from the nominative. Nouns that already end in -s have a phonological rule that deletes the suffix. (I.e. we don't do any of that silly -s's-stuff.)

* The sole exceptions are marked by zero, and are nouns whose stem end in -s. The -s suffix can be attached after definite suffixes and numeral suffixes as well, giving e.g. sg: hus / huset-s, pl: hus / husen-s, sg: bil-s / bilen-s, pl: bilar-s, bilarna-s.

** (The canonical example is 'kungens av Danmark bröstkarameller', i.e. 'chest candies', but this just sounds weird to English speakers. Apparently they were aniseed-flavoured with some beetroot for colour.)

As for -s going on the final word of an NP, this means that something like

mannen som kom ins skor gnisslar
the man who came in's shoes squeak

is entirely acceptable in colloquial Swedish. SAG claim that some words, however, do not tolerate -s on it even in such positions, and include some personal pronouns in that class. Rewording seems the only reasonable solution in such cases - omitting the -s is not permissible. 

Syntax

In some varieties of Northern Swedish, the definite form sometimes is used in a way that seems as though it might be influenced by the Finnish accusative and partitive, or that in some other manner strongly deviates from the way it is done in Swedish. My dialect has some traces of this, but as it is strongly restricted by the lexicon (only a semi-closed class of nouns do this) and by semantics, rather than by syntax and semantics, I hesitate to call it a case as far as my dialect goes. It may be that it is more case-like in dialects further north. However, even then you have to account for how the definite seems to operate in any syntactic position even before the -s genitive.

The -s genitive is nowadays used besides adnominal and complemental possessives, as a stand-in for nouns (Peter's book was boring but Elof's was interesting), and with some restrictions with some prepositions.

The Case System in the Modern Swedish Pronouns

Morphology

	I	you (sg)	he	she	it	itcommon	reflexive	we	you (pl)	they
nom	jag	du	han	hon	det	den	--	vi	ni	de
acc	mig	dig	honom	henne	det	den	sig	oss	er	dem
poss	min mitt mina	din ditt dina	hans	hennes	dess	dess	sin sitt sina	vår vårt våra	er ert era	deras

 

It^common is a gender that emerged in the 18th century, into which non-humans nouns that previously were masculines and feminines were moved. In modern Swedish, it is called 'utrum reale', sometimes just utrum or reale. Conservative dialects often retain the three-gender system.

As you might see, there are large similarities with English. Unlike English, however, the possessive pronouns for my, your, the reflexive, our and your (pl) have gender congruence. For this reason they're not considered case forms, but some form of possessive adjectives. NB: terminology on this varies from author to author.

Swedish also lacks the my/mine-distinction. "Mine" in some sense has some case-like properties that differentiate it from "my", thus presenting English with a two-genitive system. (I am here thinking of 'of mine' and such).

It, and it^common sometimes get the genitive form dens, dets, but these are considered substandard or wrong. "Hons" as a possessive of "hon" does occur in some speakers idiolects, and of course anything like "jags", "hons", "hans", "vårts", etc can occur if you create a relative subclause for a genitive noun and force "jag", "han", "hon", etc to be the final word of the subclause, e.g. something like

the guy who talked faster than I's book
snubben som talade snabbare än jags bok

However, these will probably feel somewhat off to a significant number of speakers. (My personal view is that -s in Swedish and -'s in English are postpositions that go after an NP. These are ok for me in spoken Swedish, but not in written Swedish.)

Swedish has had a who/whom-distinction (ho/vem), but the oblique form has won out and hardly anyone even recognizes "ho" anymore. The last time it was used in print was in the 1940s in a hymn book for certain hymns from the early 19th century. The third person plural pronoun is nowadays in colloquial Swedish mostly "dom", with the de/dem-distinction still surviving in Finland. I am unaware if any colloquial speakers have any kind of three-way distinction between de/dem/dom. (Imagine how cool it would be to discover some Swedes having a tripartite alignment with 'dom' for intransitives or something like that!)

Historically, "han" was both the nominative and accusative. "Honom" was exclusively dative. Many dialects and almost all colloquial Swedish retain "han" for the accusative (and dative as well). I am unaware whether any speakers of any colloquial variety retain "honom" exclusively for the dative - this would be interesting. Some dialects have further aånalogized the masculine situation and merged "henne" into "hon", sometimes with even greater loss of oblique forms of the pronouns (tho' the obliques may be retained as emphatic forms; here, my dialect is weird, having emphatic nominatives and emphatic accusatives, yet being on the way to turning the accusative and emphatic accusative into optional adornments).

Finally, 'sin/sitt/sina', the possessive reflexives, could maybe be argued to be oblique forms, as they can not stand as possessors of subjects. They can, however, stand as possessors of nominative complements, so this argument would be somewhat weak.

Examples by type

As mentioned, examples of the case system survive in fossilized phrases in Swedish. This strives to be an exhaustive list of such examples.Each type of example probably also has dialectal examples en masse in a variety of dialects. Because my dialect is a subtype of middle Ostrobothnian, this will be overrepresented.

Omitting the bolded letters should give the nominative form, otherwise, I will provide the modern nominative in parentheses. If no properly corresponding nominative exists, it is marked by a dagger.

1. Fossilized expressions with case morphemes

hemma (from 'hem' - home) historical genitive, signifies 'at home'. Hem, which is either the noun used when it is the subject or object, also is used as a directional adverb (i.e. towards home), due to this also being the historical accusative.

i ljusan låga - in bright flame - historically 'låge' was nominative, but låga has replaced it
mitt på ljusan dag - in the middle of bright day
sova i godan ro - sleep in good calm
i gladan håg - "in a glad mind", 'håg' is also an archaic noun by now.

taga till orda - to commence a speech, 'take to word'.

till väga - by (some) means, by way of ... mostly in the expression 'hur skall vi gå till väga' (how shall we go about something/by what means shall we proceed) and similar.
av daga - 'off/from day' - in the expression 'taga av daga' - to kill. ('to take away from (the) day')

i sinom tid - in its time

Basically often used to mean "after some time".

allom bekant - familiar to all
androm till varnagel - (andra) for others as a warning.

"Androm till varnagel" has probably been extinct, but saw a slight renaissance after being used in the title of a book.

ana argan list - suspect angry cunning (here, originally 'arg' probably was rather meant as 'evil')

gammal i gårde - "old in the farm", i.e. experienced

man ur huse - "man out of house"

Mostly in the expression 'gå man ur huse', which expresses something so popular or controversial that people come out in the streets to protest or acquire the thing.

dra sina färde - pull one's voyage - to leave.

fara å färde - danger on voyage, 'danger skulking about'

med vett och vilje (vilja) - with knowing and will, 'knowingly and willingly'

till viljes (vilja) - to will, i.e. "göra någon till viljes" - do someone to will, "to appease someone"

se i syne (sometimes generalized, giving höra i höre) - see in sight, but figuratively 'hallucinate a sight'.

se i andanom (ande, -n) - to see/perceive "in spirit", apparently sometimes used for 'in one's imagination'.

med råge - (råga, supplanted by råge). 'with excess'.

2. Genitive usage in expressions of time and with prepositions

tids nog - 'soon enough'

Essentially "time.GEN enough".

There are a number of expressions where the genitive or the nominative are used, with a slight difference in meaning. Generally, the genitive will signify the most recent such, whereas the nominative will signify the upcoming one. Some of the forms are morphologically slightly exceptional - generally keeping an extra vowel that would be lost in the possessive genitive.

i morse †- this morning (unclear morphological relation to morgon - morning)

i kvälls - last evening
i lördags - last saturday (works with any weekday)
i somras (sommar) - last summer
i höstas - last autumn
i våras - last spring
i vintras (vinter) - last winter
i julas - last christmas
i påskas - last easter
?i pingstas - ?last pentecost
?i midsomras - ?last midsummer
*i fastlagstisdags - last lent tuesday
*i januaris - last january

I think I might have encountered reanalyzed use of these, i.e. people using "somras" as a shorthand for the nominative "(senaste) sommaren" when signifying the most recent summer, thus enabling things like "höstas var trög, våren blir säkert bättre" ('last autumn was slow, the spring certainly will be better'). My impression is that this is very marginal.

My dialect has this strange form for yesterday morning:

i gåron måronen (c.f. standard Swedish 'i går morse')

I am inclined to believe -on is a retention of some case marker, but sound changes seem to have garbled it a bit, and it thus becomes difficult to figure out what exact case it might have been. Also, it's been a bit difficult to find morphology for "igår" (yesterday), since this only seems to survive as a set phrase in all the cognate languages.

I am not sure how to feel about the fact that the above examples all have -st instead of -s in my dialect, whereas possessive genitives and the next examples all have -s in both the standard language and my dialect. This might suggest it originally was some other type of derivative morphology in the above examples.

Several somewhat established "places" and methods of movement and miscellanous fixed phrases still take the genitive after 'till':

till sjöss - by sea
till havs - by sea
till lands - on land,
till skogs - in the woods
till fots - by foot,
till båts - by boat,
till hjuls - by wheel
till hands - available ('to hand')
till råds - for an advice ('to advice's')
till sängs (in bed, into bed)
till låns - for a loan, as a loan, borrowed
till livs - for nourishment (not 'alive')
(slå någon) till döds - (beat someone) to death
till nöds - "to need", often used to express 'as a last way out, as a sufficient but not really good substitute'; nöd nowadays rather means 'severe, immediate need or danger'.
(alla) till lags - 'vara alla till lags' signifies 'satisfying everyone's demands'.
(illa/väl) till mods - being in a bad/good mood. 'Mod' nowadays means 'courage', not 'mood'.
till  bords - aboard
till äventyrs - to adventure, more specifically 'unexpectedly'
tillbaks / tillbaka - back, in return.
till ords - in word(s).
(ta) till bruks - 'ta till bruks' signifies putting something to use.
till gårds - in(to) the yard.
till undantags - for an exception. (undan = away, tag = take; 'for awaytake')
till vardags - for everyday use. "var" is here from the same root as "varje", i.e. 'each'.
till buds - on offer. ('bud' is the noun cognate to 'bid', 'bjuda' would be the verbal form)

"Till råds" is used in somewhat different ways in different expressions, mainly expressing the notion of 'consulting someone': ta till råds ('take for an advice'), fråga till råds ('ask for an advice'), etc.

?till stads - in (the) town (dialectal?), often also till stass.
?till bys - in the village

Literally "in (the) village", but idiomatically always used in the sense of 'being someone's guest' (dialectal?). "Vi var till bys" - 'we were on a social call, we were visiting someone'.

+till vagns - by wagon
?till peds - by bicycle
?till cykels - by bicycle,
?till sparks - by kicksled

I believe "till vagns" is extinct in the wild. The last two I'd use in dialect, but not in the standard language. I am convinced 'till peds' exists in several dialects. Other prepositions, mainly nowadays turned into compounds:

utomlands - abroad
utom laga tid/laga bot/... - beyond legally mandated time/legal fines/...
inombords - on the inside
utombords - on the outside
med ens - at once, "immediately", literally "with one's"
motvalls - adjective signifying 'contrarian', literally "against the embankment'

medsols - "with sun's", i.e. clockwise
motsols - "against sun's", i.e. counterclockwise

Further, the words corresponding to 'hundreds of', 'dozens of', etc is formed using the genitive on the numeral no matter what syntactical role the NP has. However, the numeral for these is formed with 'tal' (number, cognate with 'tell') as suffix, which carries the genitive marker. The noun itself is in the nominative, unless it is a possessor.

tiotals - 'tens of'
dussintals - 'dozens of'
hundratals - 'hundreds of'
tusentals - 'thousands of'
tiotusentals ...
hundratusentals ...
miljontals ...

Other obliques as object or after prepositions:

i min ägo († äga) - 'in my possession'
i hennes närvaro († närvara)- 'in her presence'

Närvaro has been lexicalized as a nominative by now, so e.g. "närvaro är obligatorisk": presence is mandatory.

komma i delo - 'to get into a strong disagreement'

Del signifies 'part', but here, 'delo' simply is 'apart' or somesuch.

sätta å sido (sida) - put aside. "Å" is a semi-fossilized preposition in Swedish.
utan återvändo († återvända) - without return
skämt åsido : "joke(s) aside", a common phrase after saying a joke and I don't even get what the point of this phrase really is.

till salu († sala) - for sale

till fullo - fully ('to full')

till yttermera visso - to outermore wit ("in addition", "also")
till godo - for benefit, for gains, to (some kind of figurative or literal) credit
av ondo - of evil
i lönndom (†, sorta) - in secret, no corresponding nominativ.

till spillo - (something goes) to waste, spill is not very commonly used, but is basically the nominative form.
i så måtto - to such an extent, to the extent, to what extent ('in so measure')
över måttan - exceedingly, 'over the measure'
fatta posto - to occupy a position (c.f. the second meaning of 'take post')
under någons domvärjo (-värja) - beneath someone's sword of judgement, "under someone's jurisdiction".

åtminstone 'at least'

Some of these also appear in compound verbs: åsidosätta (put aside), tillgodogöra (to compensate, literally "to make for a benefit"), saluföra (literally "sale-lead", to market, to sell, to mongle).

3. Old genitive forms in certain types of expressions

Towns and villages whose names end in a vowel in some contexts get a suffixless genitive:

Åbo Hovrätt - Turku court of appeals
Vasa stadshus - the town hall of Vasa ('Vasa town house')
Visby mur - wall of Visby (Visby wall)

In other contexts, the -s is expected, e.g. "Åbos nyaste misstag" - the newest mistake of Turku.

The plural genitive marker -a appears on "lag" (law) in some expressions:

i laga ordning - in lawful order
laga förfall - lawfully valid excuse
i laga kraft, i laga tid, med laga stöd, med laga rätt - in lawful validity, in lawful time, with legal support, with legal right.

4. Ackusative (or oblique) forms that have become their own lexemes

Besides the already mentioned närvaro and ägo, another -varo word qualifies: tillvaro ('existence', especially in the sense of focusing on the quality of said existence).

Other examples include:

ande / anda

Ande signifies the spirit of a being. Anda is rather 'the spirit of a moment, movement, time'.

fura / furu

Fura is a specimen of pine, furu is pine, the material.

Apparently, several types of tree and wood have, at least dialectally, such pairs, e.g. björk/björke (birch), rönn/rönne (rowan), asp/aspe (aspen), en/ene (juniper), ek/eke (oak), sälg/sälge (sallow), bok/boke (beech), pil/pile (willow)  where the -e-variant is the wood material, and the e-less-variant is the actual tree.

dag / dager

In Old Swedish, 'day' was nom: dagher, acc: dagh, dat: {dæghi, daghi}), gen: daghs. Dag nowadays means 'day', dager means 'daylight'.

mosse / mossa

These are cognate to English 'moss'. A mosse is a type of swamp, mossa is moss.

grädde / grädda

Cream, cream of the crop/the social elite.

ull / ylle (wool)

With these two, it seems to me that the overlap is a bit greater than with the previous examples: while on the sheep, it is only ull, but after that point, both are used, but then for compounds like "ylletröja" (wool sweater) only "ylle-" is possible. "Den är av ylle" (it is (made) from wool) is however probably also mandatorily 'ylle' rather than 'ull'.
 

Although this is not an example of case, a similar development has happened with the distinction between trä ('wood', as in the material) / träd ('tree', as in the plants) , where a former definite form ('träð') has become a new indefinite singular form with a slight change in meaning, and we thus have the historically 'double definite' "trädet" (the tree), vs. "trä(e)t" (the wood).

ände / ända

Visually very similar to the spirit/metaphorical spirit-pair, this pair is at the other end of human experience: end, ass. "Ända" sometimes does appear in expressions such as "till ända" ('at end', i.e. finished), and "ände" sometimes does signify "ass", so this pair is somewhat ~statistical. Ända is thus statistically more likely to signify the ass end, whereas ände is statistically more likely to signify other ends.

 

5. Datives and obliques in place names

Topononomy will be overrepresented in prepositional phrases, and it's likely for oblique forms to feed back into the nominative for this reason. Several places have retained the plural dative - as their only form, replacing the nominative - for this reason, here present either as -om or -um:

Sundom - strait (sund is cognate to 'sound')
Husom - house (hus is an obvious cognate)
Pörtom - pörte is a type of house with a smoke hatch rather than a chimney
Bodom - hut ('bod')
Husum - house, again. -um and -om might have been in free variation
Kvänum - seems disputed, probably rather *Kvädnhem, so the qued home, from the name of a river.
Lerum - clay? (Unlikely?)
Vattjom - ?
Skedom - spoon?
Torrom - ?
?Salom - halls?
Skadom - damages (?)
Lökom - onion?
Mjällom - in modern Swedish, mjäll is dandruff. I doubt this is the correct etymology.
Östmarkum - east land ('mark')
Västmarkum - west land ('mark')
Arlom - ?

The singular dative -e may also have survived, but since -e can appear in nominatives as well (an old masculine marker), this is harder to spot on a map. I imagine Tjärne, Höje, and several -inge may have such an origin, but it is hard to weed out false positives with this.

The singular oblique -a also appears:

Grundsunda - shallow strait.gen
Kasabacka - pile.gen hill.gen
Bergsboda - mountain.gen hut.gen
Ytterboda - outer hut.gen
Tobacka - ? hill.gen
Alberga - Alder mountain.gen
Vänoxa - friendly ox.gen (?) - I bet there's some other etymology there
Kårkulla - ? hill.gen
Torsholma - Thor's islet.gen
Björnholma - Bear islet.gen
Västansunda - west.obl strait.gen
Aspa - aspen.gen?
Fjälla? - mountain.gen
Stavsudda - staff.gen ness
Haga - hedge or meadow (from hage). Cognate to The Hague.

-u/-o are also an oblique form that may be present in at least a few place names:
Korpo, Nagu, Sagu, Sorpo?

It is conceivable that some toponyms ending in -an are historical accusative adjectives, but since -an also is a nominalizer in more modern Swedish, this is hard to be sure of. Whether Långu outside of Stockholm is a dialectally altered "Långö" (long island), or an oblique form is hard to tell. I am not aware of many islands whose names are just adjectives, (whereas such names seem fairly common for lakes and rivers).

Pedersöre, Örebro, Öresund may contain a dative of "ör" (c.f. Helsingör, Lappörarna, Bockören, Kungsör, Skanör) . Linde probably has a dative suffix. Sörberge and Norrberge might well be a dative as well (but might also be a reduced "-berget"), in the vicinity of those you also find some -ede (which might be dative of -ed), and Svedje (which might be a dative of "sved", but not of "svedja"; who knows.) Näse looks very much like a probably dative of "näs" (rather than a nonsense form of "näsa"). However, this too could be a reduced definite form.

6. Adjectives and adverbs that are really datives or -o obliques

ånyo - anew
förvisso - for certain, ("for wit")
åsido - aside
redo - ready - might be a case form

lagom - suitable, to a proportional/suitable extent, quantity or quality'. Definitely a dative form of lag ('law').

stundom - sometimes. Plural dative of 'stund', i.e. 'a while' (c.f. German Stunde, "hour").

bråttom - requiring haste, from bråd ('haste, sudden').

enkom - cognate to 'änka' (widow), apparently from an adjective derived from 'one'. It describes something that is 'as if made specifically for' some person, purpose or thing.

länge comes from the accusative form of long ('lång'), and signifies 'for a long time'. This seems to have already been turning into a lexeme of its own in Old Norse.

7. A single example maintaining the previous double genitive -s- and other non-prepositional genitives

In older Swedish - much like cognate icelandic forms today, the genitival -s- went both on the stem and after the definite suffix for definite nouns of the appropriate declension.

Today, this is seen exclusively in the phrase dagsens sanning, the truth of the day.

Some "naked s-genitives" can be found in adverbial roles:

sams: (from the cognate of 'same'), signifies 'in agreement'.
ens - one's - 'even' (mainly in negative clauses or questions, in Finland more widespread than that).
dags ('(it is) time'), from the cognate of 'day'.
strax? ('Soon').
nyss? (new's, signifying 'a moment ago').

8. In compounds

This is one type of position where you actually find a near-productive survival of the case system. Swedish compounds are somewhat tricky with regards to morphology - sometimes, there are linking morphemes (-s-, -e-), sometimes, the stem is used, sometimes the nominative, and sometimes something else. -s- and -e- do look a bit suspicious given what we know of the modern as well as historical genitive (-s-), and -e having been both a masculine nominative marker and a dative marker. I am inclined to think they originate with the historical cases, but their distribution has over time come to reflect the nominal conjugations ever decreasingly.

Some of these are place names: Stugu-näs (cottage.obl-isthmus). Others are verbal compounds, some nominal compounds, some adjectival:

vattumannen - waterman (aquarius)
vattustark - water strong (e.g. too dilute) (dial.)
vattupass - water level (dial. or arch., nowadays often vattenpass),
vattukanna (dial.) - water pitcher

Water is normally vatten in Swedish, and -u is clearly the oblique case form.

skadeanmälan ('skada' , the modern nominative, is a survival of the historical oblique, whereas skade is a survival of the old nominative) - damage report
högskoleprov (skola is similar to skada) - literally "high school (entrance) test", but högskola signifies polytechnics or universities.

sagotant - fairytale-aunt, i.e. some aunt that reads fairytales for children
sagofigur - fairytale-character
sagovärld - fairytale-world
sagotimme - fairytale-hour (the time for reading fairytales at kindergarten)
sagobok - fairytale-book
sagoväsen - fairytale-being, ...

människobarn - human-child,
människoformen - the human shape
människosläktet - the human species

sidospår - side trace, side track
sidojobb - side job
sidoväg - byway
sidoskåp - side cupboard

vargavinter - wolf winter, i.e. a very cold winter
ulvakläder - wolf clothes, in the inversion "får i ulvakläder" (sheep in wolves clothing), that sometimes is used to express someone projecting an exaggerated threat)

mannaminne - "man-memory", a time unit roughly corresponding to the time the oldest generation has been alive

syndaflod - sin flood, the deluge
syndaskrollon - the sin fold (harmonica).

barnatro - child's faith, i.e. the naive and uncomplicated acceptance of religious claims by a kid,
barnavård - child care

 (but barnkläder, barnskötare, barnläkare)

kvinnorättsfrågan (women's rights question)
kvinnokläder (women's clothes)
kvinnosakskämpe (women's issues fighter),

jordavarelse - earth being, earthly creature
jordalivet - earthly life 

nattamat - a small meal during night time
 

(but jordklotet - earth sphere, jordägare, "earth owner")

varuhus, varubod - warehouse, warehut?

salutorg, saluhall, saluföra - market square, market hall, to sell

nämndeman (from 'nämnd', dative?) - committee member

backstugusittare - "hill cottage sitter", a social class in Sweden and Finland in the 18th and 19th centuries. (Don't believe wikipedia when it claims it was a "social class in Sweden"! Swedish wikipedia editors are notoriously unaware of Finland.)

legosoldat - mercenary (from lega, nowadays leja - to employ)

hövdingasäte - seat of a chieftain

nådaår - year of mercy

Dialectal and archaic vocabulary can be added ad nauseum: väga-kant, väga-arbejtar, väga-lag, vattu-drag, vattu-rör, vattu-täkt, vattu-svensk, +tunnebindare*,

* This is weird, because -e there might just be a linking morpheme.

9. Dialectal retentions

Some northern dialects (especially Dalarna, Älvdalen, and occasional places north of there) may have preserved three cases - and intriguingly, at least Älvdalska has lost the genitive, doing the exact opposite of the majority of mainland Scandinavian.

My own dialect is claimed by some speakers to have had a feminine dative pronoun ('hennar') in use as an actual dative until rather recently. Nowadays, we're going in for the Norrlandic loss of case distinction in pronouns, though. Some dialects may well keep a henne/hennar distinction, and I would not be surprised if some dialects maintain "honom" as the dative pronoun, using "han" for nominative and accusative.

10. "Accusativism"

There are several examples in Swedish where the oblique forms have replaced the nominative - skola (from old Swedish skoli, obl. skola), skada (skadi, skada), låga (logi, loga) are three examples. Since -a is identical to the feminine marker, these are hard to spot unless one is aware of them. -e in compounds can, however, be an indicator: högskoleutbildad, högskoleansvarig, skadeanmälan, skadeförsäkring, (however, misleading examples can be found, such as stugetak) .... Ape/monkey - apa - seems to have gone through the same shift even earlier, but we still get apesläktet, the ape family, in some older works.

The loss of Old Norse -R for many nouns may also be a result of a more widespread accusativism (c.f. nom: maðr acc: man, modern Swe: man), ved from {veðR, veð, veði, veðdar}. Whether the F-Swedish dialectal vederlider (for F-Swedish vedlider, for standard Swedish vedbod) originates with nominative veðr or genitive veðar is hard to decide.

Eastern Swedish dialects (i.e. in Finland) have largely undergone accusativism, retaining the oblique case for most nouns at the expense of the nominative, giving a striking difference that is hard to explain as the result of sound changes. The word to the right is the dialectal version expected in large areas in Finland (with possible further vowel changes in the first syllable)

påse - påsa
stake - staka
backe - backa

kaka - kako
ruta - ruto
låga - lågo

In some parts of Ostrobothnia, the adjective as well keeps the masculine accusative morpheme - "en godan kako". (My dialect has replaced the comparative marker -are with the accusative marker instead, so in my dialect, that would signify a 'tastier cake', not a tasty one. Apparently, speakers near the geographical boundary between -an-as-masculine-marker and -an-as-comparative manage to keep trace of what variety you speak.) In southern Finland, the masculine nominative -er on adjectives survives and has often spread quite a bit, being used for feminines as well for some speakers.

 

11. Adjectivified genitives

enahanda, mångahanda, allehanda, varjehanda, tveggehanda, tveggedel, tveggeskafta, treggehanda(!), laga, ...

'Tvegge' and 'tregge' themselves are genitive forms, so 'tveggedel', despite not ending in -a, has a genitive component.

All the 'handa'-adjectives signify the amount of variety something exhibits: "enahanda" means uniform, boring, monotonous. Mångahanda, allehanda, varjehanda - of many/all/every varieties/variety.  Tveggehanda, treggehanda - of two/three types. Tveggedel - two-parted. Tveggeskafta - two-handled/with two shafts.

(d)jävla, (d)jäkla, jädra - genitives of curses, i.e. 'of the devil' with a variety of bowdlerization.

12. Finnish loans from Swedish

It seems Finnish has historically preferred borrowing the oblique form (and basing the Finnish nominative off of it). Thus, many of the Finnish loans do the same a# -> u#-shift. Whether this is due to the dialects doing it first or due to the obliques being more frequent for many words is hard to tell, but given the timespan over which this seems to have been going on, it makes sense to think it's also been a Finnish phenomenon for a longer time than our accusativism has been. Maybe Finnish affected the Finland-Swedes into this accusativism? We do also find exceptions, such as Swedish påse/Old Swedish posi ≃> modern Finnish pussi.

Appendix: Old Swedish Case Morphology in Tabular form

Dove, a feminine noun, here with some of the alternative suffixes omitted (-om/-um, -umin/-omen, etc seem to have been in free variation). Modern Swedish genitives and nominatives are also included for comparison:

dūva (dove), f:

	sing indef	sing def	plur indef	plur def
nom	dūva (duva)	dūvan (duvan)	dūvur (duvor)	dūvuna(r) (duvorna)
acc	dūvu	dūvuna	dūvur	dūvuna(r)
dat	dūvu	dūvunni	dūvum	dūvumin
gen	dūvu (duvas)	dūvunna(r) (duvans)	dūva (duvors)	dūvanna (duvornas)

 

As we can see, acc/dat/gen are conflated in the singular in the indefinite singular. There are, however, some other conflations, each marked by colour coding. Notice that 

posi (sack) conflates acc and gen in the plural wih acc/dat/gen in the singular.

posi (sack), masc:

	sing indef	sing def	plur indef	plur def
nom	posi (påse)	posin (påsen)	posar	posarnir
acc	posa	posan	posa	posana
dat	posa	posanom	posom	posonom
gen	posa	posans	posa	posanna

 

For some nouns, nom-acc-dat are conflated in the indef. sg., and nom-acc are conflated everywhere. Some other conflations may occur, e.g. acc/dat-conflation or dat/gen-conflation. Neuters conflate nom and acc, sometimes nom-acc-gen.

The -r- in modern 'duvorna' (and other similar nouns) is probably an orthographical innovation to make the forms more consistent. It is pronounced in but a few dialects.

Adjectives

There are 48 slots in the adjective paradigm. Luckily, there's a lot of syncretism, but ... first: the strong and weak adjectives. Weak adjectives tend to be used with definite nouns: the strong man, the strong one.  Here, I used "strong" to emphasize that there is no semantic significance to the names strong and weak: they could just as well be called red and blue adjectives or medieval and oily adjectives. Strong adjectives are used for indefinite nouns, and for complements. Exactly when they started operating as complements - or if it's west Germanic that has lost congruence on complements - is unclear to me.

The strong adjectives have this pattern or something very much like it:

	masc sg	fem sg	neut sg	masc pl	fem pl	neut pl
nom	-er, -	-	-t	-ir, -er	-ar	-
acc	-an	-a	-t	-a	-ar	-
dat	-um, -om	-(r)i	-u, -o	-um, -om	-um, -om	-um, -om
gen	-s	-(r)ar	-s	-(r)a	-(r)a	-(r)a

In modern Swedish, this has simplified to nothing for reale sg, -t for neuter, -a for plurals.

The weak ones are like this:

	masc sg	fem sg	neut sg	masc pl	fem pl	neut pl
nom	-i/-e	-a	-a	-u, -o	-u, -o	-u, -o
acc	-a	-u, -o	-a	-u, -o	-u, -o	-u, -o
dat	-a	-u, -o	-a	-u, -o	-u, -o	-u, -o
gen	-a	-u, -o	-a	-u, -o	-u, -o	-u, -o

In modern Swedish, these have become -a. For all forms. Except masculine nouns can take -e, and there are some other complications in how -e is used. In some dialects, the -e forms also appear with (masculine) plurals, and in some dialects, the -u forms have won out instead.

Appendix II: additional examples to incorporate

One major issue with writing this is that new examples keep popping up, both through introspection and through reading. Some of these are examples I've not even been aware of, others are ones that I am reminded of when encountering them, and some of them are ones that just pop up out of introspection, and when looking them up they turn out to exist. A few false starts of that kind have happened as well, but are filtered out by actually looking them up. This might indicate that this is "quasi-productive" in Swedish, though?

till synes

nåd, nåde, nåder

i rättan tid

gå i sömne

urbota

båda/bägge as case distinction seems to survive in some regions

i sin prydno

huruvida/såtillvida

i blindo

ge vika ?

bärsärkagång

mörksens gärningar

himlavalvet and "himla tider"

inalles (german loan?)

så här års

 förstone/sistone/åtminstone/

Detail #430: Split-prominent languages

An idea that I suspect exists in the real world is split-prominent languages. Languages which for some verbs (or some constructions) favour a topic-comment structure, and for some verbs (or constructions) favour a subject-prominent structure.

If I knew more about Japanese, I would maybe know whether it qualifies, but that's where I'd search first.

Some thoughts on conlang families and typology

This post details some thoughts about typology, and then comes up with some ideas for Dairwueh-Bryatesle-Sargaĺk. Or, to be long-winded about it:

Some thoughts on typology, relative (and other) pronouns and Dairwueh, Bryatesle and Sargaĺk in light of Indo-European and Uralic 

1. Typological preamble

I have sometimes come across the claim that a very conservative and thoroughly Indo-European feature that has survived in all branches since day one is the interrogative pronouns are also relative pronouns thing. It turns out this is wrong, but it's still interesting enough to spin an idea off it.

 

If anyone is not familiar with the gist of the idea, English has several obvious examples of this:

the man who bought the car
the areas which Caesar conquered
at the time when she arrived

 

Not all languages with relative pronouns have these correlations with interrogative pronouns, c.f. Hebrew, where relative pronouns and interrogative pronouns do not overlap at all.

Even then, of course, the overlap in IE languages is not complete - both English and Swedish have interrogative/relative conflation to some extent, but counterexamples exist: c.f. English 'the house that I bought', Swedish "bandet som hon spelar i" ("the band that she plays in", som being a cognate to English 'some', actually). Some "non-Q-root interrogatives" sometimes also work as relatives, sometimes not. In Swedish, some speakers dislike using "när" as a relative adverb ('when') which is an exceptional interrogative due to not having a historical "qw"-root, and prefer using 'då' ('then', quite clear a cognate and not interrogative as all) as a relative adverb for times, and even more strongly, people prefer "där" over "var" (there, where).

It turns out that this structure might go back to fairly early Indo-European, but must have been lost in several branches and later re-emerged in Germanic and Slavic, for instance, through Latin influence. Many languages in the "near-IE" sphere have also been influenced by the Latinate construction, possibly with Germanic or Slavic vectors of influence: Finnish has began to use mi-interrogatives (which are mainly for non-human referents) as a relativizer, in addition (in some dialects instead of) the joka-relativizers.

 

Joka is, in the singular nominative identical to 'each', but in the other cases they are distinct. First of all, as a determiner it is not (necessarily) inflected for case: joka mies, joka miehen, joka miehellä, (each man, each man's, by each man) ..., although there is also an inflected form jokainen/jokaisen/jokaisella which can be used independently or as a determiner. 

As a relative pronoun, 'joka' is inflected for case, but the root is jo-, and -ka is a suffix that goes after the case suffix or vanishes: mies, joka ... (the man who ...), mies, jo-n-ka ... (the man whose ...), mies jo-lla ... (the man with whom ...), miehet jo-t-ka ... (the men who ...). Apparently, some eastern dialects maybe retain the -ka, but my sources on this are a bit unclear. I am, alas, rather unaware of how relativization is handled in other Uralic languages.

 

Here we actually get a slightly disconcerting thing: Sihler's New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin suggests PIE had a relative pronoun yoh-. Why do tantalizing hints at Indo-Uralic jump out at every corner? Why!?!

 

3. Specifics of relativization

I like the overlap with four different types of pronouns that we find here: "each"-quantifiers, some-quantifiers, demonstratives and interrogatives. I also can see a reasonable grammaticalization path for each of these into being used as a relativizer, and it's also possible to find a slightly less demanding grammaticalization path if they start out as something more general and turn into relativizers AND this-or-that on the other hand.

Now, we can take the basic idea "formal conflation of so-and-so with relativizers as a stable feature in a language family".  So-and-so doesn't even have to be pronouns - it could be some auxiliary, it could be some type of pronoun, it could be some conjunction. Relativization happens in many different ways in different languages, but I have decided to go for relative pronouns as one of the strategies present in all BDS languages.

4. Stable features in families

It's clear Indo-European does have some rather stable features over times: the three gender system (say I, writing in one of the languages that has lost it and speaking another that has reassembled it natively), verbal prefixes that are largely overlapping with prepositions, -a as a feminine marker (somewhat less stable), ... so, having a few stable features in Dairwueh-Bryatesle-Sargalk (as well as others in Cwarmin-Ŋʒädär) might very well lend these groups a more "family"-like type of grammatical style.

It is conceivable, however, that this is a type of survivor bias! Proto-Indo-European probably had quite a large amount of features. Just by random chance, we'd expect a handful of features to survive in multiple branches: us thinking of these features as resilient or somehow "characteristic" features of a family might be a mistake. They may very well be features that just have survived the elimination lottery.

4. Implications for Bryatesle-Dairwueh-Sargaĺk

So, as a kind of tribute to Indo-european, I will have a 'similar' correspondence as the one we just ... well, partially debunked or threw on the trashheap or whatever. After a way too long post, here's the nugget:

In BDS languages, relative and reflexive pronouns greatly overlap, and this goes back to proto-BDS.

I think this might require some reworking of Bryatesle, Dairwueh and Sargaĺk.

 

Detail #429: Pseudo-Gender

It struck me that a language could have a system of lexical associations that are somewhat gender-like without quite being a gender system. Let's begin with a basic, fairly gender-like version.

The ways in which this system expresses itself is in which nouns are used to express relations:

If a thing is the origin of something, it's either its mother or father; if it originates with another thing, it is its son or daughter; it goes together with something - brother or sister. Closely associated with something? Husband or wife. Other typically sex-specific terms are also associated, and human-metaphors are either fully male-centric or fully female-centric for any given noun.

However, we can also imagine other ways of expressing relations. Maybe the categories are streams and trees!

Origin - source, root.
'Offspring' - (part of) delta, branch (or nut, or seed, or fruit)
Associate - a different, named river that is culturally seen as close, a specific different species of tree
Intimate associate - a named tributary, the word for a major branch
Decline - drought, fall over
Increase - flood, grow

A Question about Syllabic Consonants

Is there any language that has a syllabic consonant that, in the language, lacks a non-syllabic equivalent?

E.g. a language whose only lateral is a syllabic consonant, or whose only rhotic is syllabic.

Detail #428: A Case

Consider a language where the nominative and the vocative are identical. However, what if a clause may only have one nominative-vocative constituent, and the subject therefore is a marked nominative in the presence of vocatives?

What would be a reasonable name for such a case?

I find it rather likely for this to be restricted to pronouns - or in case nouns also get it, that it is at the very least not distinguished in adjective congruence.

Detail #427: Articles and articlelessness with plurals

In English (and similarly Swedish), plurals normally take no indefinite articles. (There is actually an indefinite plural article in Swedish, which is used in some very specific circumstances, e.g. expressing astonishment*.)

Now, we can imagine a language where indefinite articles also appear for plurals more regularly.

It seems common for languages with indefinite articles to permit omission of these articles in some contexts, e.g. "I like coffee". In English, the context is nearly exclusively mass nouns, whereas in Swedish it is more 'open', with e.g. nouns after some prepositions preferring to be without articles, complements of the copula often being without articles, and a variety of other contexts which are a bit difficult to catch in a simple description. (I intend to write a description of this at some point.)

So, here's the idea for a detail in a language:

• Plural articles, both definite and indefinite.
• Contexts where the articles are not used.
• For each noun, there is a lexical preference for which number to use when articleless.
• Maybe, just maybe, there is also a preference based on verb and syntactic position, but these preferences interact in some way.

* The plural indefinite article is simply "one" with a plural marker: 'ena'. Examples of expressing astonishment:

det var allt ena dyra mackor

that was all-(neut) a-s expensive-s sandwiches

"ena" is never mandatory, afaict.

'Det var allt []' is a set expression also introducing a mildly astonished statement about something.