SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Latin Influence on the Norwegian Language 165
complications arose here. Old Norse lacked an ablative
case and Old Norse til and Latin ad governed different
cases. No problem arose when the prepositions i, af,
mea were followed by a single noun. They were put
into the ablative as they were after the corresponding
Latin prepositions in, ab, cum: i articulis, af consilio,
med prebendario, But if a Norwegian pronoun or
adjective was used attributively, it was put into the
dative: j besso transcripto, j vaaro consistorio, af
pessarre cedula, mea sinni scriptura, undirpvilikri forma.
There was, however, some vacillation. We find i
claustra in the Book of Homilies; Bishop Hakon writes
af apoiecharia and likewise, j testamentum sijt. Here we
should expect the ablative. It is not usual to put
individual nouns into the genitive after til, though we
can, in the Icelandic bishops' sagas, come across a
combination like til Laurentii, When a Norwegian word
is added we get a hybrid form, e.g. til samtals ok
consilium, til testamentum mins, til annars caudam,
where annars instead of annarrar is possibly due to the
fact that the masculine hali was in the writer's mind as
a translation of the feminine cauda. We have several
parallels to this type of gender-creation; i Credo uarre
has arisen under the influence of feminine iru and siena
pater noster under the influence of feminine been. It is
by no means unlikely that complements of the type
mentioned above were partly responsible for the disintegration
of the Norwegian case-system and for the fact
that til gradually ceased to govern the genitive.
Norwegian syntax has been affected to an equal degree
by Latin, and it is probably in this field that Latin influence
has made itself most strongly felt in the so-called
"officialese" (kansellisprdk) or learned style. Most
people will feel this"officialese" to be typified by a broad,
detailed, complicated, and to a certain extent obscure,
sentence structure as opposed to the terse, pithy and
laconic mode of expression which the description
"popular style" conveys to the mind.