SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
In many cases it was possible to fit a Latin noun into
a Norwegian declension by a small alteration, or sometimes
without any alteration at all. In a letter from
Bishop Audfinn the skipan herra Wilialms legati pawans
is discussed. Here legati is without doubt the genitive
of legatus. But in the same letter he writes skipan
fyrnempndz legata. Here we have a norwegianised
an-stem. It was also easy for Norwegian to incorporate
Latin feminine words of the first declension which
in the nominative had the same form as the feminine
on-stems. We can see that bibliam, cedulam and peteam
have been adopted in their Latin form, but kapella and
nattura are declined on the Norwegian pattern. When,
however, Bishop Audfinn inserts the word persona and
Archbishop Eiliv the word summa, both in the nominative,
it is impossible to decide which language has the
upper hand.
Among the individual Latin words which have become
established in Norwegian literature the nouns certainly
predominate. The reason for this is probably that they
did not fit into the Norwegian inflectional system as
easily as the verbs. The endings of verbs such as
appellare, subportare, tractare, visitare stood closer to
the norwegianised infinitive ending -era, which with
vowel reduction could become -ere, than the corresponding
nouns stood to any of the Norwegian declensions.
In this connection we may cite such instructive examples
as "po at han hafe appellerat a correcione vestra" and
"rned sira Arna prebendario varom sem visiterat skyldi
af vaarre veghna".
If a pure Latin noun was inserted into an otherwise
Norwegian text, the case which its syntactical position
demanded was of course used. We have already seen
the accusative bibliam, cedulam, peteam as direct
objects, and we can add articulus, nominative subject,
the indirect objects prebendario and notario in the dative,
and the objective genitive testamenti. One or two