Changes

The history of Swedish names 5 main periods: Runic Swedish (800-1225), Classic Old Swedish (1225-1375), Old Swedish (1375-1526), New Swedish (1526-1732), Modern Swedish (since 1732).  

The history of Swedish names 5 main periods: Runic Swedish (800-1225), Classic Old Swedish (1225-1375), Old Swedish (1375-1526), New Swedish (1526-1732), Modern Swedish (since 1732).  

The modern Swedish language is normalized by the Stockholm dialect, which now leads the norm. The dominating role of the Stockholm dialect was defined in the 18th century. Most other regional variants are now considered as erroneous. It would be worth saying that the modern norm introduced by Stockholm was also exposed to great influence of Danish, which resulted in admitting even those simplifications that are not typical for spoken Swedish. For example, the difference between the Masculine and the Feminine genders is still present in most spoken forms of Swedish, but it was radically eliminated from the literary norm. The result of inconstant evolution of the Swedish language now has its results in the great variety of dialects which are sometimes hard to understand by other dialects’ speakers.  

The most important fact from the evolution of the Swedish language is the changes that happened in its morphological (grammatical) structure. This relates Swedish to English, which has simplified its grammar, as well. In general, the grammar of modern Swedish is based more on word orders and auxiliary words than word inflections (grammatical endings). For example, in the sentence “The woman gave the girl a book”, we know who gave whom and what from the word order only. That means, that the active part of the sentence (the woman) is the Subject, and she is placed at the beginning. The Predicate (the verb “gave”) follows, and then we say who and what the Objects are. First, the girl comes as the receiver: this is the so called Indirect Object. The last thing mentioned is the book which is just given and thus is passive. The passive instance in the sentence, which is exposed to an action, is called the Direct Object. In English (and this is true about Swedish, too), the Subject and both Objects did not receive any endings – it is the word order only that defines the meaning. If we try to change it, we’ll have to use a preposition to clarify what we want to say: the woman gave a book to the girl. Believe it or not, but in ancient English and Swedish, they had tools to differentiate between Subjects and Object inside a word, and those tools were called cases. There aren’t lots of cases nowadays, but we still use them sometimes (“him” from “he” or “woman’s” from “woman”, for example). The simplicity of Swedish grammar doesn’t concern the Noun only. It is in general all grammar which was exposed to simplification.

 

 

 

[[Category: Germanic languages]]

[[Category: Germanic languages]]