SWEDISH LANGUAGE AND LITERA TURE. Swedish 'whams to I he northern eh of the Germanic family, 'within which it is all eastern development of the old Aust.. I unga, 01' 1):111ish t011gIle, a name ly applied to the language spoken not in Denmark only, hut in the rest of Scandinavia as well. It was very much the same in the entire Northland down to about A.D. 900, or a little later, when it Iwgan to dif ferentiate into an eastern type, ramifying into Danish and Swedish, and a western type, giving rise to Norwegian and Icelandic. Irom 900 to 1500 the Swedish branch is called old Swedish. Until after 1200 the only records are runic in scriptions, cut for the most part on gravestones. The use of the Latin alphabet began in the thir teenth eentury. In the fourteenth century. when a literary language began to develop out of the Siidernianland dialect, the differentiation from tanish proceeded slowly; after this Caine a period of extensive approximation to Danish, to be fol lowed in time by an archaizing period. which restored original forms. _\side from divergt,noies of \ ocabulary. Swedish now differs from Danish especially in retention, after a vowel, of the old voiceless consonants, lr, t. p. which in Danish changed to g. d, b. and in its retention of the vowels a and o in unstressed syllables. where Danish has c or no vowel at. all: thin: Swedish bah, 'Look,' mat, 'nowt.' aim. 'ape.' are in Danish Log, mail, abe. Swedish (Our mi sreas/,•n 'do you speak Swedish?' is in Danish tiller dr tsrensk ; t?we'thsil liknor sin inor. 't ho girl resembles her mother.' is in Danish pia,n /igner nimfrrca. fader this head it mat• he added t hat Swedish Las not the 'glottal catch' of Danish. and that Danish has not the delicately modulated musical accent of Swedish.
The main body of the Swedish vocabulary is (11d Germanic stock. the principal foreign in gredients being (11 Latin and Greek words that came in with Christianity or with the “rowth of st•Eolarship: (2) Low German words dating from the time of the Ilanseatic• League. as a rbel . `to work,' storc/, sinaka. 'ta-te:' Cl) man words from the time of the Thirty Years' War. as tapper, 'brave.' prakt, `splendor:' (41 Fretieh words borrowed in the seventeenth and eighteenth eentnries, as afiiir. 'business.' tithing, talent.' charmant, 'Alarming: like the other North-Germanie tongues, Swedish has the post positive definite article (originally a pronominal affix) ; thus jlicka, 'girl,' 'Haan, 'the girl.' As in English, nouns have but one case (the genitive), xvIfich is now distinguished by inflection. The genitive ending is -s, which is appended after the article; thus Ilickans mar, 'the girl's mother.' The plural of nouns is formed by means of the endings -or. -or, -cc, -en. to which the definite arti cle is appended in the forms -on, -ne. according to a feeling for vowel-balance which shows itself as early as the fourteenth century; thus flickorna, 'the girls.' but detente, 'the dales.' A new pro
noun of address, ni, taking the place of I, came into the language in the seventeenth century and is now commonly used in books; but in conversa tion Swedish politeness prefers to avoid it and substitute the title of the person addressed, put ting the verb in the third person; thus, iir frun sjuk, is the lady sick?' = 'are you sick, madam?' The verb still retains the old Scandinavian pas sive in -s, which was originally an affixed reflexive pronoun; thus, kalla. 'call,' kallas, 'to be called.' A more peculiar feature of conjugation is the differentiation of the perfect. passive participle into two forms, one of which. called the supine, is used to inflect the perfect tenses, while the other is declinable and serves as a true participle; thus jag her iilsket, 'I have loved.' but jug Or alskad, 'I am loved.' and vi Tiro diskette, 'we are loved.' In the printing of Swedish the Roman letters have long since prevailed. Speaking somewhat roughly, the written language of to-day repre sents the pronunciation of about two hundred years ago; and as phonetic change has been at work during the interval, it is the ease, just as in English, that the written form is often a bad index to colloquial utterance. Swedish print teems with 'silent' letters: thus, jug skal rare i staden, shall be in the city,' is pronounced ja ska rara. i skin; and hvad +dr det, 'what is it?' becomes va a de. For the learner of Swedish one of the greatest difficulties is presented by its peculiar accent, which involves both stress and variations of musical pitch. Every word has either the simple or the compound tone. The simple tone is a rising modulation, while the compound (to quote from Sweet) "consists of a falling tone on the stress-syllable, with an up ward leap of the voice and a slight secondary stress on a succeeding syllable." Not only the correct pronunciation. but the very meaning of a word often depends on the exact modulation of its musical accent.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. For Old Swedish the leading Bibliography. For Old Swedish the leading authority is Noreen. A Grammatik (Halle, 1897 ) . He has also treated the subject in his Geschichte der nordisehen SPIT Chen ( St ra sAbn rg, MS), a reprint of his article in the second edition of Paul's Grundriss. The great work on Swedish grammar is Rydqvist, Svenska sprethets lager (6 vols., Stockholm. 1850-83). A good small grammar is Schwarz and _Noreen's Svensk sprtiklara (ib., 1881). There is no good grammar in English. The best Swedish-English dictionary is that of Bjiirkman (Stockholm, I SSG). The great dictionary of the Swedish Acad emy, Ordbook tifrer st'cnska spraket (Lund. 1894 et seq.). is only in the initial stages. On the sub ject of the dialects consult Lundell, N'yarc bid rag till kiinnedom out de srenska landsmalen, etc. (Stockholm, 1879 et seq.). An excellent account of Swedish pronunciation by Sweet is given in Transaction's of the Philological Society (Lon don, 1877-79).