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We propose a rapid adaptation of FAVE-Align to the Nordic languages, and we offer our own adaptation to Swedish as a template. This study is motivated by the fact that researchers of lesser-studied languages often neither have sufficient speech material nor sufficient time to train a forced aligner. Faced with a similar problem, we made a limited number of surface changes to FAVE-Align so that it – along with its original hidden Markov models for English – could be used on Stockholm Swedish. We tested the performance of this prototype on the three main sociolects of Stockholm Swedish and found that read-aloud alignments met all of the minimal benchmarks set by the literature. Spontaneous-speech alignments met three of the four minimal benchmarks. We conclude that an adaptation such as ours would especially suit laboratory experiments in Nordic phonetics that rely on elicited speech.

We describe the application of language technology methods and resources devised for Icelandic, a North Germanic language with about 300,000 speakers, in digital language resource creation for Faroese, a North Germanic language with about 50,000 speakers. The current project encompassed the development of a dedicated, high-accuracy part-of-speech (PoS) tagging solution for Faroese. To achieve this, a state-of-the-art neural PoS tagger for Icelandic, ABLTagger, was trained on a 100,000 word PoS-tagged corpus for Faroese, standardised with methods previously applied to Icelandic corpora. This tagger was supplemented with a novel Experimental Database of Faroese Inflection (EDFM), which is a lexicon containing morphological information on 67,488 Faroese words with about one million inflectional forms. This approach produced a PoS-tagging model for Faroese which achieves a 91.40% overall accuracy when evaluated with 10-fold cross validation, which is currently the highest accuracy for a dedicated Faroese PoS-tagger. The products of this project are made available for use in further research in Faroese language technology.

This work deals with identification of the three main Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) from spoken data. For this purpose, various state-of-the-art approaches are adopted, compared and combined, including i-vectors, deep neural networks (DNNs), bottleneck features (BTNs) as well as x-vectors. The best resulting approaches take advantage of multilingual BTNs and allow us to identify the target languages in speech segments lasting 5 s with a very low error rate around 1%. Therefore, they have many practical applications, such as in systems for transcription of Scandinavian TV and radio programs, where different persons speaking any of the target languages may occur. Within identification of Norwegian, we also focus on an unexplored sub-task of distinguishing between Bokmal and Nynorsk. Our results show that this problem is much harder to solve since these two language variants are acoustically very similar to each other: the best error rate achieved in this case is around 20%.

The article dwells on factors of the “presence” of English in the cognate languages of the Scandinavian region where a common translingual situation has evolved. The “presence” of English is argued to be a case of translingualism resulting from interaction of English and Scandinavian languages superficially visible through the processes of borrowing and code shifting. The data collected from internet interviews of Nordic speakers is claimed to demonstrate that abundance of anglicisms and code shifts in their translingual communication testifies for the vitality of Scandinavian languages.

The paper presents comparative analysis of the names of North Germanic origin in the Primary Chronicle. In Section 1, the author analyses the spelling of the names of the ambassadors who participated in the conclusion of the Treaty of Prince Igor with Byzantium (944) as attested in several copies of the Chronicle and suggests approximate reconstructions of the names’ Cyrillic spellings. Section 2 deals with the “Varangian” names from the Chronicle which have sound reflexes different from the known Scandinavian ones. In addition to the names of the ambassadors of 944, the author involves other North Germanic names found in the Primary Chronicle. The author argues that such deviations may reflect phonetical peculiarities of the North Germanic dialect spoken by the northern Germans who served in the “Scandinavian” druzhina of the Southern (Kievan) Russian princes until the 12th century. Table 2 includes the “Varangian” names with the features of the postulated “Russian Varangian” dialect as compared to the Proto-Norse reconstructions and the known North Germanic names. Section 3 provides comparative analysis of phonetics of the “Varangian” names. The author concludes that most of these names do not belong to any of the known North Germanic languages. The phonology of the “Varangian” names indicates an early separation of the “Russian Varangian” dialect from the Proto-Norse stem. Table 4 presents regular reflexes of the Proto-North Germanic vowels in the “Russian Varangian” dialect. Section 4 is devoted to the annalistic names of Scandinavian origin that have vocalic reflexes different from the “Russian Varangian” ones. The author provides comparative analysis of this group of names as attested in the Primary Chronicle and Novgorod birchbark manuscripts (Tables 5 and 6). Finally, Table 7 represents an index “From Proto-North Germanic reconstructions to the ‘Varangian’ names” which includes both “Russian Varangian” names and annalistic names reflecting the phonology of other North Germanic languages and dialects of the 10th–12th centuries.

Throughout history, the cultures of the Nordic countries have at certain points been seen through a lense that stresses regional commonality, most recently with terms like “New Nordic Cooking” or “Nordic Noir.” In this article, we examine the possibility of a common concept of “New Nordic Comics” by analyzing a number of Nordic comics anthologies. We discuss in what way Nordic comics might be said to be new and how they can be considered to be Nordic. We state that the comics in the collections are not identifiable as particularly Nordic based on their themes or the stylistic or visual repertoires. In these respects, Nordic comics are part of a broader transnational comics culture. The comics, however, occasionally bear witness to a Nordic background or heritage, for instance, in the form of words in Finnish or the Scandinavian languages, names of characters or the milieux in the comics. On the whole, Nordicness in comics is variable and diverse, and rather than a phenomenon based on inherent quality or aesthetic commonality, new Nordic comics are a result of promotional strategies, cultural policies, and transnational connections between Nordic actors in the comics field. (Published: 8 November 2016) Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 8, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v8.30253

There is persistent linguistic sexism in the anthems of some countries that are members of the United Nations which diametrically negates the principle of gender equality and the global condemnation of gender-biased language use, especially in public communication. This can be very serious because anthems represent unique symbols of national identity that epitomise nations whose male and female citizens deserve equal recognition and representation. This paper presents the outcome of a linguistic investigation of selected fifty-eight translated anthems originally written in some West/North Germanic and Romance/Italic languages. Firstly, this reveals twenty (20) cases of replication of linguistic sexism that originate from the Source Texts (STs) and which are duplicated in the Translated Texts (TTs) of the anthems. Secondly, it discovers thirteen (13) cases of evocation of linguistic sexism in the anthems which do not originate from the Source Texts (STs) but which only emanate from the Translated Texts (TTs) of the anthems. Thirdly, it detects eleven (11) cases of revocation of linguistic sexism where cases of sexism reflected in Source Texts (STs) are neutralised in Translated Texts (TTs) of anthems. The paper then details a Critical Discourse Analysis via the description, interpretation and explanation of the cases of replication, evocation and revocation of linguistic sexism of the translated national anthems. Finally, the paper suggests the need for resolution of linguistic sexism of translated anthems via replacement of misogynistic expressions which are gender-biased with androgynous expressions that are gender-neutral among others. Keywords: linguistic sexism; translated anthems; linguistic overhaul; linguistic panaceas; CDA DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2016-2202-15

This chapter investigates social positioning through the use (or non-use) of address pronouns in Finland-Swedish and Sweden-Swedish service encounters recorded at theatre and event booking venues i ...

The production of high-end series is expensive and with limited national audiences in the Nordic countries only the licence-fee financed public service broadcasters have traditionally ventured into television drama in the Nordic languages. In the mid 2010s, this started changing, partly because of the international outreach and sales of serials such as Forbrydelsen/The Killing (2007–2012) and Borgen (2010–2013). This development incited new players to move into the television drama arena and brought about a new focus on international co-production in the Nordic television landscape. This chapter explores some of these recent changes through a qualitative case study of the Danish-French co-production set-up behind the high-end drama serial Herrens veje/Ride Upon the Storm (2017–), focusing on the perceptions of strengths and challenges as well as questions of creative control in this particular set-up among the Danish partners (The Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) and SAM Productions).

Due to internationalization of higher education, the amount of English taught programmes at university level in non-English countries is increasing. Internationalization has the purpose partly of recruiting international students and partly of making national students more attractive on a global job market. Furthermore, Danish politicians see internationalization as having the potential of adding value to a given programme. In practice, internationalization seems to mean shifting to English, but at the same time there is a desire for continuing development of the Nordic languages in academia. Thus, the principle behind the language policy at University of Copenhagen is parallel language use, representing an ideal linguistic situation where two languages are used for academic purposes. This paper presents findings from a study of language use in two courses taught in English at UCPH suggesting that the participants choose language based on communicative efficiency rather than language policy. One group of students uses English and Danish socially and professionally. Danish is, however, only at the Danish-speaking students’ disposal, which creates two groups of students and asymmetry on the course. This represents a dilemma that needs to be addressed in the form of a more detailed language policy of parallel language use along with a far greater concern for the didactics of parallel language use in the classroom.

The conclusion seems inescapable, if the facts in Emonds & Faarlund are more or less right: Middle English would be the outcome of a shift from West Germanic grammar to an eccentric form of North Germanic grammar.

Seiichi Suzuki, The Meters of Old Norse Eddic Poetry: Common Germanic Inheritance and North Germanic Innovation (Ergänzungsbände zum Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, Band 86). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. XLV+1096 pp.

I have two goals in this paper, namely (1) a more global one: to present (and try to account for) the variation concerning verb particles across the Germanic languages, and (2) a more “local” one: to use some of this variation data to support my analysis that Yiddish is an SOV-language like German and Dutch and not an SVO-language like English and the Scandinavian languages. Yiddish is similar to German as far as verb particles are concerned, and this follows from an analysis of Yiddish as SOV, but not from a hypothetical SVO-analysis.

This paper outlines major directions in the reception of Knut Hamsun in the Romanian cultural printed press. The research is based on a plethora of articles in Romanian cultural periodicals spanning the years 1902–1989. The results shall be encompassed in a doctoral thesis on the same subject. The structure of the paper follows a chronological overview of the phases of his reception. Because the interwar period has been discussed in detail in other previous papers, focus shall be put on the communist era. The first oscillations occur between the years 1940–1947. As a result of the Stalinist regime, Hamsun is only portrayed in terms of his political views. Communism thus reduces his authorship to a minimum. A renewed interest emerges in the 1980s through a new series of translations and articles. This interest is then compounded with the founding of the Department of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures in Cluj in 1991 and continues to the present. Articles from all of these time periods are evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively to acquire a holistic image of how Hamsun is received by Romanian culture.

In The Revelations of St Birgitta: A Study and Edition of the Birgittine-Norwegian Texts, Swedish National Archives, E 8902, Jonathan Adams offers a detailed analysis of the manuscript and its cont ...

MARIANNE E. KALINKE, ed. The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the North and Rus' Realms. Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages 5. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011. Pp. x, 223. isbn: 978-0-7083-2353-3. $85.00. The Arthur of the North is the fifth volume in the Series 'Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages,' which is intended as a collection of volumes dealing with Arthurian material in the national languages of Europe. Together, this series will replace R.S. Loomis' Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1959). So far have appeared: Volume 1, The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. Rachel Bromwich, O.H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (1991) (reviewed in Arthuriana 6.3, 83-84); Volume 2, The Arthur of the English, ed. W.R.J. Barron (2001) (reviewed in Arthuriana 12.3, 112-13); Volume 3, The Arthur of the Germans, ed. W.H. Jackson and S.A. Ranawake (2000) (reviewed in Arthuriana 11.3, 122-24); and Volume 4, The Arthur of the French, ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Platt (2006). Volume 6, The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard, also appeared in 2011 and volumes on the Arthur of the Iberians and the Arthur of the Italians are promised. The editor of this volume, Marianne Kalinke, CAS Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Trowbridge Chair in Literary Studies Emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is hardly a stranger to readers of this journal. She is the foremost authority on the Arthurian literature of Scandinavia, and her publications in this field include King Arthur North-by Northwest (Copenhagen, 1981), Norse Romances, 3 volumes, part III of the Arthurian Archives (Cambridge, 1999) (reviewed in Arthuriana 10.4, 78-80), as well as numerous handbook and encyclopedia contributions on the subject and a large number of articles in learned journals. Nor does this volume disappoint. Its nine articles on various aspects of Arthuriana in the Scandinavian Languages and a concluding article on the influence of Arthur on the medieval literature of Belarus and the Ukraine are all first rate contributions. Each contribution has its own bibliography (which leads to some duplication), and there is a brief general bibliography at the end of the volume where can also be found a list of manuscripts cited and a comprehensive index. After a brief introduction to the subject matter, Kalinke opens the volume with an essay dealing with the introduction of Arthurian material into Scandinavia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The earliest text to be translated was the 'Prophetiae Merlini' from Book VII of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, which was turned into a poem of 103 stanzas around 1200 as Merlinsspa, followed shortly afterwards by a prose version of the Historia under the title Breta sogur (The Histories of the Britons). However, the Golden Age for the translation of Arthurian materials into Norse is the thirteenth century, particularly during the reign of Hakon IV Hakonarsson of Norway (1217-63). He promoted the translation of romances involving the matiere de Bretagne beginning with Tristrams saga ok Isondar. This is an important text as it preserves the complete narrative of the Roman de Tristan by Thomas de Bretagne which otherwise survives in French only in fragmentary form. This translation was followed by three romances of Chretien de Troyes, which appeared as Erex saga, Ivens saga, and Parcevals saga with a separate Valvens þattur (The Tale of Gawain). A collection of Breton lais, many by Marie de France, was also made under the Strengleikar [Stringed Instruments] and a translation of the Lai du cort mantel (Mottuls saga). Arthurian material was only a part of Hakon's program of translation, and Kalinke's essay is particularly useful in the way it contextualizes the different demands made on the translators and the consequences of this translation program for subsequent Icelandic literary history, particularly the development of the riddarasogur [stories of knights]. …

The very first translation of the Eclogues into a Scandinavian language, Peder Jensen Roskilde's Bucolica (1639), is concerned with interpretative closure. Following the tradition of reading Virgil's poetry allegorically the translation supplies names and circumstances where the text is unspecific. More than that, however, the translation also includes glosses, thus making the translation a hybrid between a commentary and a translation, a didactic translation. This article offers an analysis of this translation with a special focus on the relationship between the historically oriented allegorical interpretation and this unusual format.

We are gathered here to say goodbye to a dear friend. A friend who mastered all the Nordic languages, who loved to bring us all together, to mix and blend our nationalities, our cultures and our ideas in a melting pot. We became curious and creative, filled with a desire to know more about each other’s health care and welfare systems. Together, we would try new ways. We learned that Nordic welfare is present in all the Nordic countries but has different colours. Together, we had a palette of choice that could bring new life into systems that at times were stiff and unwilling to be open to other ways of developing our health and welfare. Because you were such an open-minded friend, you not only embraced all Nordic countries, but you extended your invitation and welcome to students and teachers from the wider world to come and study and share their ideas, cultures, knowledge, skills and views on health. We have had the privilege of visiting your house, sharing the excellent and exciting meals, being part of the discussions at the table and then returning home with renewed energy, new views and ways to walk. We are keenly aware of our good fortune. We are grateful to you and the governments who gave us that gift. Our hope is that you have planted so many trees and flowers in our gardens that your spirit - our Nordic School of Public Health – will spread, grow and nurture not only the health of the Nordic north but of the wider world.

Övdalian is spoken in central Sweden by about 2000 speakers. Traditionally categorized as a dialect of Swedish, it has not received much international attention. However, Övdalian is typologically closer to Faroese or Icelandic than it is to Swedish, and since it has been spoken in relative isolation for about 1000 years, a number of interesting linguistic archaisms have been preserved and innovations have developed. This volume provides seven papers about Övdalian morphology and syntax. The papers, all based on extensive fieldwork, cover topics such as verb movement, subject doubling, wh-words and case in Övdalian. Constituting the first comprehensive linguistic description of Övdalian in English, this volume is of interest for linguists in the fields of Scandinavian and Germanic linguistics, and also historical linguists will be thrilled by some of the presented data. The data and the analyses presented here furthermore challenge our view of the morphosyntax of the Scandinavian languages in some cases – as could be expected when a new language enters the linguistic arena.

The authors examine how learning objectives were implemented in a study program named “Bachelor of Scandinavian language and literature” at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). One of the authors played a crucial role in this process, thereby obtaining insights into attitudes and practices of the faculty involved. The focus of the article is on established writing and oral presentation skill requirements in the study program. We examine the extent to which these requirements were communicated to the students, and how learning objectives were transformed into teaching and learning structures, in assignments and exams. This study confirms the lack of a solid shared practice for implementing and utilizing learning objectives. Moreover, there is clearly a need for guiding principles displaying how learning objectives may be used at course level. Much work still remains before the aforementioned established language and presentation skills are effectively implemented into the study program, including greater relative emphasis in exams and as guidelines for grading. © 2015 Vidar Gynnild og Kristin Melum Eide. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

The aim of much linguistic research is to determine the grammar and the lexicon of a certain language L. The spoken variant of L – in so far as it is considered at all – is generally taken to be just another projection of the same grammar and lexicon. We suspect that this assumption may be wrong. Our suspicion derives from our contrastive analyses of four corpora, two Swedish and two Danish (covering spoken as well as written language), suggesting that – in the dimensions of frequency distribution, word type selection, and distribution over parts of speech – the mode of communication (spoken versus written) is much more significant as a determining factor than even the choice of language (Swedish versus Danish).

Norfoods was established in 1982 and now includes agencies and institutions responsible for food composition work in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and lately Greenland. Recent activities include publications of national food composition tables, a glossary on food terms used in the Nordic languages and specific projects, e.g. on publication of food composition data on the Internet, folate in foods and dietary calculation procedures.

The connection between mad cow disease (BSE) and humans, and the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in Great Britain in February 2001, have shaken the principles of the commercial farming business. The great leap from mixed organic farming to commercial farming took place in the industrialised countries soon after the Second World War. Important preconditions for commercial farming were the new innovations made in the agricultural chemistry. The principles of commercial farming were for the first time called into question at the beginning of the 1960s by the late American biologist, Rachel Carson, in her book, Silent Spring (1962). The book was a ‘declaration of war’ on the chemical companies and researchers working with chemical crop-protection all over the world. Silent Spring was soon translated into the Nordic languages. This article focuses on the reactions of the leading Finnish and Swedish agricultural magazines to Carson's provocative claims. Among Swedish agricultural experts, Cars...

There has been an almost century-long debate about the origin of Gothic pliuhan ‘to flee’ and its relations to semantically cognate words like Old English flēon, Old High German fliohan and Old Icelandic flýia. Traditionally it has been assumed that fl- developed out of pl-, and that the Gothic word hence represents a more original state than the West and North Germanic forms, but another school of thought contends that the change took place in the opposite direction,fl-being original and pl- secondary. The conflict is as yet unresolved.The present paper attempts to throw some light on the problem by placing it in a more general context and asks the question, If fl- > pl- and pl- > fl- are both theoretically possible, which change or substitution is intrinsically the more probable one? Material from Latin, Russian, German and English is adduced to suggest that [θ] relatively frequently changes into [f] or is replaced by [f] but that the opposite rarely if ever happens. Reference is then made to st...

In the second half of the nineteenth century several ophthalmological journals appeared (Germany, England, France, United States). In the northern countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden) an initiative lead to 'Nordisk ophthalmologisk Tidsskrift' published in the scandinavian languages in the years 1889-92. The 'driving force' behind the journal was the first professor in Ophthalmology in Copenhagen, Dr. Edmund Hansen Grut. The purpose with this presentation is to give the background for the rise and fall of the journal which was an attempt to promote Nordic Ophthalmology. The authors turned out, however, to be mainly those involved as editors. The journal never gained broad acceptance and it simply stopped in 1892, without any closing remarks. In spite of its short life the journal should be remembered for the very first publication on the arcuate scotoma, the Bjerrum scotoma from 1889. Although shortlived the initiative was not in vain, as can be read in the preface to the very first volume of Acta ophthalmologica.

Spraksnille (= linguistic genius) was a Swedish word that Tolkien became attracted to. He enjoyed the beauty of sounds, especially in Welsh and Finnish, but also in the Scandinavian languages. I once sent Tolkien a clipping from the Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, in which he was called a spraksnille. He wrote back to me immediately, as he used to do: “I am actually not a spraksnille, as Dagens Nyheter says on 7 February 1973…” But this is exactly what he was and that can be shown in many ways.

On Danishness and the Mother Tongue. A Speech by Grundtvig November 5th, 1839 By Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen In the last half of 1838 Grundtvig delivered a series of lectures on European history from 1788 to the present which gained him the wider public acceptance he for many years had been striving for. In early 1839 some former members of his audience set up a regular society for common citizens dedicated to the promotion of Danishness, Danske Samfund (the Danish Society), with Grundtvig as chairman. The idea was to have conversations and discussions after a short introduction from one of the elected leaders of the club - often Grundtvig himself. Singing songs by Grundtvig and other nationally inclined poets as well as old heroic ballads also helped to create an atmosphere of solidarity and popular and national community. The history of Danske Samfund can be pieced together from the texts of more than 100 introductions which Grundtvig gave, statements by individual members and anonymous police reports on some of the actual sessions. A detailed examination of Danske Samfund has recently been published by the present editor in Dansk Identitetshistorie, III, Copenhagen 1992, p. 31-79. On Tuesday evening of November 5, 1839, Grundtvig in an introduction spoke about his mother tongue. He first claims the historical independence and venerable age of the Danish language, emphasizing its principal difference from Old Norse as well as from a hodge-podge of old Danish and Low German. In his eyes precisely these qualities make the vernacular the only natural means of thinking and feeling for the Danes. Thus the general use of Danish becomes a necessary condition for a thriving culture and national life of the Danish people. Grundtvig continues with an account of his own road to the Danish language. A native Zealander being reared in Jutland, he grew up with the two major Danish dialects, and as a school-boy he on his own read Danish books such as the old chronicle about Holger the Dane. At the university he had to speak Latin and did so (also to evade boredom), but was not permanently tainted by the experience. As a private tutor at the manor house of Egel.kke he resisted the temptation to speak German like the master and the mistress. When at this time he made his d.but as a writer, he clearly favoured Old Norse or Icelandic as the alma mater of Scandinavia and almost considered Danish to be her illegitimate daughter. Following the separation between Denmark and Norway in 1814 he happily realized that he did possess a mother tongue that in fact was nothing but Danish. He recollects this to have occurred in 1816, as he studied the medieval Rhyming Chronicle (printed for the first time in 1495 with several later reprints). Since then he managed to learn to speak and understand spoken English and also became more familiar with the other Scandinavian languages and dialects, and he translated Saxo’s Deeds of the Danes from the Latin, Snorri’s Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings from the Old Norse and the Beowulf epic from the Anglo-Saxon. However, he never doubted that from ancient times Danish is the mother tongue of the Danes. Accordingly he never ceased to regret that those who identify themselves as enlightened and educated persons use the vernacular as if it were a foreign language, not realizing its richness, depth and beauty. It is one of Grundtvig’s declared aims in Danske Samfund to promote the use of the Danish language outside trivial everyday life. In an alternative, but incomplete draught Grundtvig, by way of introduction, mentions a misleading article in a German periodical by a Holstein citizen who claims High German to be an already widespread and ever expanding language in Denmark. Grundtvig’s introduction of Nov. 5, 1839 is another of several retrospective autobiographical interpretations in his works. In this case he concentrates in a deliberately cool and detached manner on his relationship to the Danish language. This was just before the death of Frederik 6. released growing national tensions in the United Monarchy and brought up the burning issue of Danish versus German that finally led to the Schleswig-Holstein war 1848-51.

§ 1. One of the most persistent problems of Germanic historical phonology is the question of the origins of the so-called *ē 2, i.e. the sound that represents a long ē different from original Gmc. *ē, sometimes termed *ē 1 (from I.-E. *ē), as seen by the divergent development of these sounds in West and North Germanic.

This paper discusses V2 word order and information structure in Swedish, German and non-native German. Concentrating on the clause-initial position of V2 declaratives, the ‘prefield’, we investigate the extent of L1 transfer in a closely related L2. The prefield anchors the clause in discourse, and although almost any type of element can occur in this position, naturalistic text corpora of native Swedish and native German show distinct language-specific patterns. Certain types of elements are more common than others in clause-initial position, and their frequencies in Swedish differ substantially from German (subjects, fronted objects, certain adverbs). Nonnative cross-sectional production data from Swedish learners of German at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels are compared with native control data, matched for age and genre (Bohnacker 2005, 2006, Rosén 2006). The learners’ V2 syntax is largely targetlike, but their beginnings of sentences are unidiomatic. They have problems with the language-specific linguistic means that have an impact on information structure: They overapply the Swedish principle of “rheme later” in their L2 German, indicating L1 transfer at the interface of syntax and discourse pragmatics, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1 (subject-initial and expletive-initial clauses, and constructions with så (‘so’) and object det (‘it/that’)).

We present an approach for knowledge-free and unsupervised recognition of compound nouns for languages that use one-wordcompounds such as Germanic and Scandinavian languages. Our approach works by creating a candidate list of compound splits based on the word list of a large corpus. Then, we filter this list using the following criteria: (a) frequencies of compounds and parts, (b) length of parts. In a second step, we search the corpus for periphrases, that is a reformulation of the (single-word) compound using the parts and very high frequency words (which are usually prepositions or determiners). This step excludes spurious candidate splits at cost of recall. To increase recall again, we train a trie-based classifier that also allows splitting multipart-compounds iteratively. We evaluate our method for both steps and with various parameter settings for German against a manually created gold standard, showing promising results above 80% precision for the splits and about half of the compounds periphrased correctly. Our method is language independent to a large extent, since we use neither knowledge about the language nor other language-dependent preprocessing tools. For compounding languages, this method can drastically alleviate the lexicon acquisition bottleneck, since even rare or yet unseen compounds can now be periphrased: the analysis then only needs to have the parts described in the lexicon, not the compound itself.

Halla Norden is a web site with information regarding mobility between the Nordic countries in five different languages; Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Finnish. We wanted to create a Nordic cross-language dictionary for the use in a cross-language search engine for Halla Norden. The entire set of texts on the web site was treated as one multilingual parallel corpus. From this we extracted parallel corpora for each language pair. The corpora were very sparse, containing on average less than 80 000 words per language pair. We have used the Uplug word alignment system (Tiedemann 2003a), for the creation of the dictionaries. The results gave on average 213 new dictionary words (frequency > 3) per language pair. The average error rate was 16 percent. Different combinations with Finnish had a higher error rate, 33 percent, whereas the error rate for the remaining language pairs only yielded on average 9 percent errors. The high error rate for Finnish is possibly due to the fact that the Finnish language belongs to a different language family. Although the corpora were very sparse the word alignment results for the combinations of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic were surprisingly good compared to other experiments with larger corpora.

The back-ground of the Scandinavian computer journal B I T will be outlined, in particular with respect to computational demands in science, technology, industry and defense. The history of B I T will be described and related to the evolution of computers, numerical mathematics and computer science. Some contributed papers which have had an impact on the general development will be discussed briefly.The 19th century could perhaps be characterized as a period of preparation for the advent of the computer. It so happened that quite a few Swedish inventors played a role in this development. Scheutz, father and son, as well as Wiberg constructed mechanical devices for a somewhat automatized calculation for solving simple arithmetic problems by series of pre-determined operations. In fact, Wiberg was able to compute a logarithm table which even appeared in print. Later, Odhner built a robust mechanical, hand-driven calculator which around 1930 was followed by electromechanical calculators. All lengthy calculations had to be performed manually by this time. Let me mention a few examples from Sweden.One such problem was to find periods of so-called internal waves in the sea. These waves are huge, up to 20-30 meters in size, but nevertheless invisible. They are generated by the moon and observed as sharp changes in the salinity. The method used was numerical autoanalysis, that is a kind of Fourier analysis of the function by itself.During the war there was a great need for ballistie tables, and I belonged to a group involved in computing bomb tables for the Swedish Air Force. We used the classical Runga-Kutta method with air resistance represented graphically, and we had only electro-mechanical calculators at our disposal. After having computed a basic set of orbits we could produce the wanted tables by a suitable interpolation procedure. It is a sad fact that all our tables could probably have been computed in a couple of minutes on a fast modern computer. After the war I was involved in some rather lengthy computations on the deuteron concerning energy levels and quadrupole moment and also in problems on scattering.However, in 1946 some people in the Swedish Navy and in the Academy for Engineering Sciences got interested in the progress in the United States and after having visited the key projects they reported back with great enthusiasm. It was quickly decided to offer scholarships to four young students; they were selected in the spring of 1947. They arrived already in August or September; two of them went to Harvard and MIT while two, including myself went to Princeton. As far as I am concerned I enjoyed a phantastic hospitality, particularly from Herman Goldstine with whom I established a lifelong friendship. Back home in 1948 some of us got involved in the construction of a relay computer (BARK), completed in 1950. However, it was soon understood that there was a need for more computer facilities, and the construction of BESK under Erik Stemme was initiated. It was completed in 1953, and during a short period of time it was considered as one of the most powerful computers in the world. Clearly its structure was very much the same as that of the Princeton computer.In 1956 a simplified copy of BESK called SMIL was completed at Lund University, built with a minimum budget of some 20,000 $. This computer was used for a large variety of problems in nuclear physics (particularly eigenvalue problems), spectroscopy, mathematics (number theory, construction of tables), and also social sciences (geographical simulations). Several problems coming from industry and different research organisations were also treated.The interest in and use of computers created a very natural demand for conferences since the literature on the subject for obvious reasons was very scarce by this time. The first Scandinavian conference on computers was held May 1959 in Karlskrona, later known as the place where a Soviet submarine ran aground in 1981. One reason for this choice of site was the fact that the Swedish Navy played an important role in initiating the computer development, another that, especially in spring, it was a lovely place, situated on the Baltic. Preliminary discussions were held informally on the need for a Nordic journal on computer related problems, and at the next conference in Copenhagen in 1960 a more formal meeting was arranged. Niels Ivar Bech acted as chairman, and further Peter Naur of Denmark, Jan Garwick, Norway, Olli Lokki, Finland, and myself from Sweden were present. It was unanimously decided to start a Nordic journal within the computer area, to appear quarterly. The journal was intended to be international with papers published in English, German, or the Scandinavian languages. As it turned out, only about 4-5 papers have been published in German, and very soon papers in the Scandinavian languages gradually disappeared. Nowadays it is required that all papers be written in English.The name of the journal was a long one: Nordisk Tidskrift for Informationsbehandling, but playing around with the initials in a clever way we were able to form the name B I T. In fact, this name is most convenient because of its shortness which makes it very easy to quote papers printed in the journal. As is well known it is somewhat dangerous to suggest an activity including work since there is a great risk that the proposer is elected to carry through the project. This is exactly what happened in this case, and from the very beginning up to this time I have served as Editor of B I T. Naturally, we have also an Editorial Board with members from the Nordic countries. Peter Naur of Copenhagen has been a member right from the beginning in 1961 and Germund Dahlquist from 1962. We got financial support from the Danish company Regnecentralen under Niels Ivar Bech and from several official sources including the Nordic Research Organisations for Natural Sciences. Finally, just a few years ago we managed to become self-supporting, perhaps mostly through favorable exchange rates.During the first decade B I T tried to

In a well-known book, Hawkins (1986), expanding on an original idea by Sapir (1921), attributes a number of typological differences between German and English to the fact that German uses morphological means (i.e. case) to distinguish grammatical relations, whereas English makes use of a strict-SVO word order. Dutch seems problematic to Hawkins’ generalisation, in that neither case nor word order can be used consistently to express the basic grammatical relations. Using verb agreement as an extra parameter, Dutch can be integrated in Hawkins’ typology. In addition, data from Scandinavian languages and Afrikaans indicate that Hawkins’ notion of ‘grammatical word order’ can be replaced by a more precise word order feature, viz. the possibility to place verbs in between subjects and objects in all sentence types.

Morphology and phonology can in many cases be used to figure out which words correspond to which in Scandinavian. For instance, it is rather easy to figure out which Norwegian personal pronoun corresponds to which in Danish, and even Icelandic or Faroese. However, when it comes to prepositions and modal verbs we cannot rely on morphology or phonology alone. For example, Norwegian and Danish måtte do not always have the same meaning, and similarly, Icelandic vilja is not used as the future modal as Norwegian and Danish ville is. Instead of relying on morphology or phonology, we can use parallel corpora. Unfortunately, there are not many parallel corpora that include all of the Scandinavian languages, and those that exist are maybe not large enough to give reliable results. Nevertheless, to get a picture of what it could look like, the Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and English parts of a small treebank, The Sophie Treebank, were used to find out which modal verbs correspond to which in the various languages.

Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806–1869), prevented from obtaining academic appointments in Germany due to some ‘politically incorrect’ letters he wrote in his mid-teens, accepted a position in Basel in 1833 and was appointed to a full professorship at the University of Basel in 1835. Apart from North Germanic languages he covered in his lectures and publications, he was expert in all areas of Germanic philology. Linguistic subjects stand beside literary and cultural subjects that ranged from early periods to the beginning of modern time. Both in lectures, and in his published research, he also dealt with comparative grammar involving German, Greek, and Latin. The quality of his research as well as its scope hold their own when compared with the publications of Grimm or scholars of equal reputation.

Hermann Moller (1850–1923) received an early classical education but devoted his career to the Germanic languages of his upbringing. After earning a Ph.D. at Leipzig, he joined the Germanic philology faculty at Copenhagen, where he remained until retirement. His earliest works included writings on Indogermanic phonology, Old High German poetics, and his native North Frisian. In later work he offered proofs for the Indo-European ablaut proposed by Schleicher and Saussure and analyzed Saussure's coefficients sonantiques as laryngeals. Moller spent his later career seeking proof for a posited link between Indo-European and Semitic.

Old Norse is a medieval North Germanic language attested in Norway and Iceland. Most of the evidence comes from texts that were written and preserved in Iceland. Modern Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than any other modern Nordic language. Nevertheless, numerous innovations have taken place in Icelandic, mostly affecting its phonology and syntax rather than its morphology. Among interesting linguistic features are preaspirated stops, oblique subjects, stylistic fronting, and symmetric verb-second. In accordance with the policy of language purism in Iceland, neologisms are created for new concepts rather than borrowing words from other languages. The ancient system of patronymics has been preserved.

The significant advances witnessed over the last years in the broad field of linguistic variation testify to a growing convergence between sociolinguistic approaches and the somewhat older; historical and comparative research traditions. Particularly within cognitive and functional linguistics, the evolution towards a maximally dynamic approach to language goes hand in hand with a renewed interest in corpus research and quantitative methods of analysis. Many researchers feel that only in this way one can do justice to the complex interaction of forces and factors involved in linguistic variability, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributions to the present volume illustrate the ongoing evolution of the field. By bringing together a series of analyses that rely on extensive corpuses to shed light on sociolinguistic, historical, and comparative forms of variation, the volume highlights the interaction between these subfields. Most of the contributions go back to talks presented at the meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea held in Leuven in 2001. The volume starts with a global typological view on the sociolinguistic landscape of Europe offered by Peter Auer. It is followed by a methodological proposal for measuring phonetic similarity between dialects designed by Paul Heggarty, April McMahon and Robert McMahon. Various papers deal with specific phenomena of socially and conceptually driven variation within a single language. For Dutch, Jose Tummers, Dirk Speelman and Dirk Geeraerts analyze inflectional variation in Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch, Reinhild Vandekerckhove focuses on interdialectal convergence between West-Flemish urban dialects, and Arjan van Leuvensteijn studies competing forms of address in the 17th century Dutch standard variety. The cultural and conceptual dimension is also present in the diachronic lexicosemantic explorations presented by Heli Tissari, Clara Molina and Caroline Gevaert for English expressions referring to the experiential domains of love, sorrow and anger, respectively: the history of words is systematically linked up with the images they convey and the evolving conceptualizations they reveal. The papers by Heide Wegener and by Marcin Kilarski and Grzegorz Krynicki constitute a plea against arbitrariness of alternations at the level of nominal morphology: dealing with marked plural forms in German, and with gender assignment to English loanwords in the Scandinavian languages, respectively, their distributional accounts bring into the picture a variety of motivating factors. The four cross-linguistic studies that close the volume focus on the differing ways in which even closely related languages exploit parallel morphosyntactic patterns. They share the same methodological concern for combining rigorous parametrization and quantification with conceptual and discourse-functional explanations. While Griet Beheydt and Katleen Van den Steen confront the use of formally defined competing constructions in two Germanic and two Romance languages, respectively, Torsten Leuschner as well as Gisela Harras and Kirsten Proost analyze how a particular speaker's attitude is expressed differently in various Germanic languages.

This paper pursues an “ingenerate” or phonetically based account of iumlaut as it unfolded in North Germanic. We focus on a famous problem relating to umlaut distributions in i-stem nouns: In the long stems of that class (gestr ‘guest’, from earlier *gastiz), where umlaut is arguably less motivated phonetically, it is generally reflected throughout the paradigms, but in short stems (sta∂r ‘place’, from earlier *sta∂ir), where it is more expected, umlaut is generally absent. A central feature of our understanding of these and other Norse facts is the interleaving of processes of sound change and analogy, the latter of which, by an assumption validated elsewhere, comes into play only under extraordinary circumstances. In contrast to previous work on the conundrum of umlaut in Old Norse, we situate this account in the context of umlaut as a general phenomenon, with parallels in development to that of its West Germanic sisters. * I vikingetiden har de aeldre nordboere sikkert ogsa syntes, at den fremtraengende i-omlyd (som blandt andet gjorde a til ae i mange ord) var haeslig og sprogforvraengende, at gastiR (= gaester) var langt smukkere end den nye form gaestiR. [‘In Viking times the old Scandinavians surely also