Capítulo de instalación solar térmica

The leading idea in the previous chapters is that formal gender in modern Swedish is phonology. Hence, common gender (on nouns) is defined as the phonological pieces /n/, /n/, or /Ø/, and neuter as /t/ or /t/, the alternatives being allomorphs, used in different contexts, crucially /Ø/ being used on adjectives. These pieces of phonology are inserted on a noun together with the phonological features of the root. (8.1) shows the (initial) structure of the noun katt-en (cat-C.DEF) ‘the cat’.

(8.1) DP

D NP N

Q {/kat/ Fg /n/}

It was proposed above that formal gender phonology is taken into use, if needed, in order to make other morphological categories visible, for example definiteness and indefiniteness. If this is a correct assumption, we should be able to characterize formal gender in Old Swedish in the same way, namely in terms of phonology.

When it comes to Old Swedish, the idea that formal gender is phonology is a complicated by the fact that nouns were inflected for case too; it is not always easy to tease the expression of these two categories apart. The path from a three-way gender system with case marking on nouns to the present-day system is thus a development from a situation where the definiteness ending on a noun was a portmanteau morpheme, simultaneously expressing case and definiteness (sometimes also number), to a situation where the ending expresses solely definiteness (and number).

For the sake of simplicity we shall concentrate on the forms in the singular – the difference in gender is marginal in the plural forms. We shall start out by looking at nominative and accusative, leaving dative aside, to begin with. The genitive form is not of interest here, since

the genitive marker was reanalyzed at an early stage in the development as a clitic element, a process that is described in detail by Delsing (1991) and Norde (1997).

According to Wessén (1965 [1992], part 1:137:141), the nominative, masculine form fiskr-inn ‘the fish’ disappeared and was replaced by the form fiskinn around 1400. The reason for this change is not of immediate importance for the analysis proposed here, but it is presumably related to the change of the status of -inn, which originally is assumed to have been a demonstrative pronoun, which was reanalyzed as a clitic, finally ending up as inflection. At the stage where -inn had become inflection, it is fully expected that word-internal agreement, such as the -r- in fiskrinn ‘the fish’ (see Table 8.1), had disappeared. Feminine forms, such as

färþ-ina ‘the trip’, were replaced by färþ-in around 1450. This means that the accusative and

the nominative had collapsed at this point – though the masculine and the feminine forms were still distinct. (For neuter nouns, such as barn ‘child’, the nominative and accusative forms were homophonous to begin with, so they are not important for the discussion.)

Equally important as the collapse between the nominative and the accusative forms is the one between the ending of the masculine and feminine nouns in their definite form. This is what happened in the next step. Wessén (1965 [1992], part 1:146) notes that the definiteness suffixes for masculine and feminine nouns were “neutralized” around 1500 in the written language, as well as in the spoken language of “educated people”. This means that the ending of the masculine fisk-in ‘the fish’ and the feminine färþ-in ‘the trip’ had become identical, in the nominative and the accusative.

The stages in the development are shown below, exemplified with the singular definite forms of the masculine fisk ‘fish’, the feminine färþ ‘trip’, and the neuter hus ‘house’.

Stage 1 Masc Fem Neut

Nom fiskrinn färþin husit

Acc fiskin färþina husit

Stage 2, c. 1450 Masc Fem Neut Nom fiskinn färþin husit

Acc fiskin färþin husit

Stage 3, c. 1500 Masc Fem Neut Nom fiskin färþin husit

Acc fiskin färþin husit

For the weak declension the difference between the nominative and the accusative forms seems to have disappeared a bit later, in the majority of the dialects in the Early Modern Swedish period, around 1600. The pattern of change was slightly different for this group of nouns. In some dialects, the (old) accusative form generalized, in others the nominative one. In yet other geographic areas accusative became the generalized form for nouns denoting inanimate entities, whereas the nominative form was used for animate nouns. The details of this are not crucial for the points I make here; what is important is that the nominative and the accusative forms eventually collapsed for all nouns.

The changes described above gave rise to a situation where the nominative and the accusative forms of nouns were identical (in the singular); furthermore there were no differences between the masculine and the feminine nouns. It could be tempting to say that the masculine

-inn, as in fiskinn ‘the fish’ was replaced by the feminine -in, as in färþin ‘the trip’, but this

does not seem to be the correct conclusion, since the transition from the form fiskinn to fiskin relates to a more general change in the syllable structure; the new pattern required that unstressed syllables be short, which implies that the coda of unstressed syllables no longer could contain long consonants (in this book represented by gemination.)

Naturally, the change described above did not take place in all dialects at the same time. In some varieties, a difference between the masculine and the feminine was retained; the masculine definite ending was -en in these dialects, and the feminine one was -a (for details, see Wessén 1965 [1992]:146):78

masculine feminine Written language, “educated”

spoken language

fisken ‘the fish’, dagen ‘the

day’, foten ‘the foot’

solen ‘the sun’, natten ‘the

night’, handen ‘the hand’ Dialects fisken, dagen, foten sola, natta, hanna

Table 8.5. Nominative and accusative forms of masculine and feminine nouns in standard Early Modern Swedish and in the dialects

The three-way gender system lasted much longer in the dialects – it is even still well and alive in a few dialects in today’s Swedish. The gender reduction from a three-way to a two-way system, and the introduction of den was a process that seems to have started among the

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educated people in the higher classes. This is pointed out by Tegnér on his study of gender in Swedish:

In the beginning den appears as an aristocratic word. It belongs to the language of the governmentofficialsandit spreads at the earliest stage among highofficialsandthe nobility of the aristocratic world. In this context it is often used in the royal secretariat (Tegnér 1925 [1964], 141, my translation).

As pointed out above, it has been suggested that the introduction of the pronoun den (3C) was

due to Danish influence (Tegnér 1925 [1964]:167); the aristocratic classes and groups had intense contact with each other across the MSc area during the period. A possibility is therefore that the introduction of this pronoun triggered the gender revolution. As for Swedish, however, it seems as though the change started in the phonology of noun phrases instead, as described above. In any case, the important point is that the use of han (3M) and

hon (3F) as Syn-pronouns – pronouns that link back to noun phrases, the endings of which were indistinct – is probably possible for a while, but not in the long run. The semantic support for the female –male distinction was little or none. The confusion as to the “correct” gender of nouns is evidenced by a discussion reported in Tegnér 1925 [1964]. Tegnér noted, for instance (p. 27), that few speakers of his contemporary Swedish assigned different genders to the synonyms mullvad ‘mole’ and mullsork ‘mole’, which they should have, had they followed the traditional pattern. Without any overt markers on a noun/noun phrase in the definite form (it would have been mullvad-en ‘the mole’ and mullsork-en ‘the mole’ regardless of the gender assigned by the speaker), a distinction as to what Syn-pronoun to use,

han (3M) or hon (3F), seems not to be possible to retain in the long run; it would presumably

be too difficult for children to learn and remember.

The changes in the gender system are most probably related to a socio-cultural turbulence too. Delsing (2013) discusses the collapse of the case system in Swedish, which, according to him, took place in two steps, “the small catastrophe” and “the big catastrophe”. In his view, the major external cause of these changes was the influence of Low German in Sweden at this time.