{"id":7498,"date":"2016-09-23T15:01:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T15:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/?p=7498"},"modified":"2018-08-09T14:29:11","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T14:29:11","slug":"vikings-verbs-and-very-old-swedish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/vikings-verbs-and-very-old-swedish\/","title":{"rendered":"Vikings, Verbs, and Very Old Swedish"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDe gingo i land och kommo genast i strid med st\u00e4llets innebyggare, som bodde t\u00e4tt h\u00e4r<\/em>\u201d [They went ashore and immediately came in conflict with the inhabitants, who lived close together here], writes Frans G. Bengtsson in his novel R\u00f6de Orm<\/em> about a Viking named Red Serpent. But what\u2019s the deal with those weird verb forms? Gingo<\/em>? Kommo<\/em>? We got a question from a reader (hi, Russ!) about those verb forms in R\u00f6de Orm<\/em> specifically, so let\u2019s take a look.<\/p>\n

First off, gingo<\/em> is the past tense form of att g\u00e5<\/em>, to go, and kommo<\/em> is the past tense form of att komma<\/em>, to come. But for those of you who have studied Swedish for a while, you know that the past tense form of att g\u00e5<\/em> is gick<\/em> and the past tense form of att komma<\/em> is kom<\/em>. So what gives?<\/p>\n

Way back when, Swedish had plural verb forms. See that \u201cde<\/em>\u201d in the beginning of the sentence? That\u2019s determining the verb form of att g\u00e5<\/em> and att komma<\/em>. They went. They came. If it had just been R\u00f6de Orm himself who was going ashore, the sentence would have read: \u201cHan gick i land och kom genast i strid med st\u00e4llets innebyggare, som bodde t\u00e4tt h\u00e4r<\/em>\u201d [He went ashore and immediately came in conflict with the inhabitants, who lived close together here]. That one word, de<\/em> or han<\/em>, for example, completely changes the form of the verb. It wasn\u2019t just past tense though: jag \u00e4ter<\/em>\/vi \u00e4ta<\/em>, jag kommer<\/em>\/vi komma<\/em>, jag \u00e4r<\/em>\/vi \u00e4ro<\/em>. And so on. The subject in a sentence has a lot of power over the verb. Or did at least.<\/p>\n

The plural form of verbs isn\u2019t used anymore. As Ylva Byrman writes in her article about this change<\/a>, the plural form of verbs had fallen out of use in spoken Swedish long before writers stopped using it. She gives a wonderful example of what was, at the time at least, a piece of radical writing by Selma Lagerl\u00f6f who, in her 1906 book Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige<\/em>, used the singular form of verbs in dialogue, while leaving the plural form in place for narration. It\u2019s a pretty brilliant way of blending the two while giving a nod to the way people actually spoke.<\/p>\n

In the 1930s and \u201840s, Swedish writers moved further and further from the plural form. R\u00f6de Orm<\/em> was written in 1941 so was starting to get a bit late in the game, although some places were still using the plural forms well into the middle of the century. In fact, Svenska Akademien didn\u2019t officially accept the use of singular form for all verbs until 1973.<\/p>\n

So why does any of this matter? People haven\u2019t written like this for years. True. Kind of. You may run across this form if you\u2019re reading in Swedish. You may run across this if you\u2019re doing research in Swedish. You may run across this in old songs or poems (especially at Christmas as Linnea Hanell writes in \u201cP\u00e5 julen ska det pluralb\u00f6jas<\/a>\u201d). You may even run across this in those instances where people are trying to make their writing sound a little more old fashioned. And now you\u2019ll know if they\u2019re doing it correctly.<\/p>\n

If you have any questions about Swedish as you continue learning the language, let us know and we\u2019ll see what we can do to answer them.<\/p>\n

Good luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDe gingo i land och kommo genast i strid med st\u00e4llets innebyggare, som bodde t\u00e4tt h\u00e4r\u201d [They went ashore and immediately came in conflict with the inhabitants, who lived close together here], writes Frans G. Bengtsson in his novel R\u00f6de Orm about a Viking named Red Serpent. But what\u2019s the deal with those weird verb…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[364864],"class_list":["post-7498","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-grammar","tag-grammar"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7498"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8074,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7498\/revisions\/8074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/swedish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}