The Swedish word själv has the same has the same origin and meaning as its English equivalent “self”, but its pronunciation and therewith its spelling have developed rather differently from the English – “self” vs. själv. However, if we look back at Runic Swedish from around 800 AD, we can find many instances of a strikingly similar word: selfR. So if the words were so close then, why are they so different now? It turns out that the word in Swedish experienced immense change in the form of several phonetic processes, while the English did not.

But before I continue, I would like to make a few notes so as to not confuse you throughout the artible. First, the uppercase R in selfR is used by Scandinavian linguistic historians to represent a very harsh sound somewhere between a trilled [r] and a voiced [z]. Secondly, the letter <f> is used to represent what could either be a voiceless [f] or a voiced [v] in the early stages of Swedish (which we, of course, have no sound samples of). Eventually in this article I will switch from using the letter <f> to the letter <v> because at that point it is known that the sound was a [v].

So, let’s begin. In the first stage of transformation in the case of selfR, the fricative R was reduced to a trilled [r], leaving selfr.

selfR > selfr

Secondly, what is known as brytning, or, literally translated, “breaking”, occurred. In this process, the /e/ was phonetically “split” into two sounds: an /i/ and an /a/. The result was as followed (with all letters pronounced):

selfr > sialfr

After the brytning, the next target for change was the awkward consonant cluster -lfr. To make sialfr easier to pronounce, people started pronouncing it with an /e/ between before the final /r/, a process called epenthesis or anaptyxis.

sialfr > sialver (This happened in many words, including for example fiskr to fisker.)

After the epenthesis, what happened next was what is known as an i-mutation. I have mentioned this in a previous post, but this time the i-mutation is progressive, meaning that instead of affecting a sound earlier in the word, it affects the vowel that comes after it, in this case the /a/ (sialver).

sialver > siälver

Next, an apocope, or the dropping of a final sound or syllable – with time, the -er at the end of the word was dropped. Also, the /i/ was shortened into a half-vowel /j/, giving the following result:

siälver > själv

And finally, the actual pronunciation of the word was changed: the [ɧ]-sound, or sje-ljud, appeared, replacing the previous orthographic pronunciation of the word:

[´sjɛlv] > [´ɧɛlv]

So, the whole process went like this:

selfR > selfr > sialfr > sialver > siälver > själv > [´ɧɛlv] (pronunciation)

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how selfR made its way through time to the modern själv.