30.2754, Review: Norse, Old; Language Documentation; Writing Systems: Leeuw van Weenen, de (2019)

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Subject: 30.2754, Review: Norse, Old; Language Documentation; Writing Systems: Leeuw van Weenen, de (2019)

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Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2019 11:25:54
From: Bev Thurber [bat23 at cornell.edu]
Subject: A Grammar of Möðruvallabók

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-201.html

AUTHOR: Andrea  Leeuw van Weenen, de
TITLE: A Grammar of Möðruvallabók
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Bev Thurber

SUMMARY

Part of the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection currently housed in Reykjavík,
Möðruvallabók is a fourteenth-century collection of eleven prose narratives:
Njáls saga, Egils saga, Finnboga saga, Bandamanna saga, Kormáks saga,
Víga-Glúms saga, Droplaugarsona saga, Ölkofra þáttr, Hallfreðar saga, Laxdœla
saga ,and Fóstbrœðra saga (2). It may have been written at the monastery in
Möðruvellir in northern Iceland and was certainly at Möðruvellir (though there
is a question of which Möðruvellir) in 1628 (5–6). In this study, Andrea de
Leeuw van Weenen describes the language of the manuscript in detail through a
statistical analysis of the spelling. The main text of the book consists of
four chapters: an introduction, a description of Möðruvallabók, and chapters
on orthography and morphology. The first two chapters describe the project and
the manuscript, and the second two present the results of the analysis.

The introduction recounts the history of the project, which began as early as
1976.  De Leeuw van Weenen’s goal was to produce “a thorough description of a
manuscript” dating to the middle of the Old Icelandic period (8). As a
reasonably sized collection of prose originally composed in Icelandic and
mostly written by a single scribe in the fourteenth century, Möðruvallabók
proved a suitable candidate. Once she had selected the manuscript, de Leeuw
van Weenen created a database that included seven pieces of information for
each word: the form occurring in the manuscript, the reference, any
punctuation, the normalized form, the associated lemma, the class the word
belonged to, and additional grammatical information (13). This database is the
foundation for everything presented in the book.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed physical description of Möðruvallabók from
codicological and palaeographic perspectives, though most of the space is
devoted to palaeography. At least four people participated in writing the main
text (marginal notes are not discussed), but one fourteenth-century scribe did
most of the writing. The sections written in the lone seventeenth-century hand
are excluded from the analysis (22). Much of the chapter is spent enumerating
the letters of each type by size. Large letters are combined, whether
minuscule or not, as are small letters. Superscripts, subscripts, diacritics,
ligatures, and abbreviations are also enumerated. 

Chapter 3 summarizes the manuscript’s orthography. It includes a short
individual description of how each phoneme is typically written, including
capitalization and abbreviation, along with a list of variations. The
descriptions are quite detailed and include counts of each occurrence and
references where applicable. For example, “/m/ is spelled <m> 27 275 times,
<M> 513 times initially (or following a capital), …, <f> in fikill 122rb33,
and <n> in nargt 45rb27” (90). The long section of descriptions is topped off
by a section containing a short summary for each letter and longer sections on
abbreviations, compounds, numbers, hyphenation, and scribal errors. De Leeuw
van Weenen concluded that the manuscript features regular spelling (130) and
called the scribe “a scrupulous copyist who tended to keep not only the exact
wording of his exemplar, but also its orthography and even some palaeographic
features” (131) because the orthography is consistent within each individual
text but varies between texts.

At 134 pages, Chapter 4 represents approximately 40% of the book. It is a full
account of Icelandic morphology as expressed in the manuscript. The chapter
includes sections on nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals, adverbs, and
verbs; prepositions, conjunctions, particles, and interjections are lumped
together under “Other word classes,” which lists the forms (261). De Leeuw van
Weenen assembled complete paradigms of individual words to explain this phase
of the language. As may be expected, the sections on nouns and verbs are the
longest.

Möðruvallabók includes complete paradigms for 74 different nouns (when forms
in compounds are included) and nearly complete paradigms for numerous others
(133). The discussion of individual nouns is organized first by gender, then
by stem and type. Each part of the section on nouns starts with sample
paradigms and a list of the words in the manuscript that follow each sample
pattern. This is followed by an enumeration of the forms present in the
manuscript and descriptions of all the sound changes and spelling variations.
De Leeuw van Weenan assigned each noun’s gender based on the forms present in
the manuscript. When there was not enough information, as happened not
infrequently, de Leeuw van Weenen followed standard dictionaries (135–136). 

The sections on adjectives and pronouns are structured similarly. The
adjectives are grouped by whether they are positive, comparative, or
superlative. Unfortunately, no complete comparative or superlative paradigms
are present in the manuscript (191). The section on pronouns mainly consists
of tables of forms, and the section on adverbs is primarily a list of how many
times each occurs in the manuscript.

As for verbs, there are 67,848 forms belonging to 955 lemmata in Möðruvallabók
(224). Readers of the sagas will be unsurprised to find that approximately 60%
of the forms are third person indicative --- 40% preterite and 20% present.
The section on verbs is organized first by class, with assignments based on
the forms appearing in the manuscript. This means that some classifications
differ from those found in standard grammars and dictionaries. In particular,
weak verbs of classes 3 and 4 are distinguished by their past participles,
which results in some verbs that are usually placed in class 4 being placed in
class 3 (224). Some verbs, including weak verbs of classes 3 and 4 whose past
participles do not occur in the manuscript, could not be precisely classified,
and de Leeuw van Weenen noted all the possibilities (see, e.g., 236, 241). The
next part of the section on verbs is organized by conjugation, with a short
discussion of each part of the paradigm that includes notes on scribal errors
and unusual spellings of the ending.

The book concludes with two appendices (one listing the 22,247 compound words
in the manuscript and the other listing all the corrections made to the
database over the years), a bibliography, and an index (by paragraph number,
not page number). The index has two parts, “Lemmata” and “Persons etc.”; the
latter is a relatively short list mainly consisting of personal names and
institutions.

EVALUATION

Originally published in 2000, this book was meant as the third volume of
Möðruvallabók, AM 132 fol. (1987), which was published by Brill under the
author’s married name, van Arkel-de Leeuw van Weenen. How it became a separate
book is a tale told in the preface. Essentially, the book was delayed due to
various circumstances and other projects, most notably the author’s edition of
the Icelandic Homily book, which involved the typesetting nightmare detailed
in de Leeuw van Weenen (1997). A Grammar of Möðruvallabók ended up being moved
to a different publisher (xiii), but has now returned to Brill in this
reprint. This review treats it as a standalone volume rather than part of a
set.

De Leeuw van Weenan’s work on Möðruvallabók spans nearly a quarter-century.
This long timeline highlights the importance of this volume, which provides a
record of the manuscript as it was by the time the transcription was finished
in 1981 (9). When de Leeuw van Weenen revisited the manuscript in 1997, its
condition was noticeably worse. Therefore, she gave more weight to earlier
readings, including those of other editors, changing the transcription in 17
places (xiii). In particular, one of the exceptions to the rule that
first-person pronouns follow verbs without the -m ending (slu, 11rb7) is no
longer readable (253n200). 

Such small details are important because one of the book’s themes is reliance
on the manuscript as the authority. This high level of trust in the manuscript
means that all the variant spellings are noted to ensure that no phonological
or morphological changes are overlooked. The downside is that this trust may
have allowed scribal errors to propagate. De Leeuw van Weenan notes that
errors and important spelling variations can be indistinguishable (59). By
trusting the manuscript, she allows scribal errors to pass undetected.

The analysis combines computational and manual methods. Although the database
is the foundation, much of the work was done by hand. De Leeuw van Weenen’s
descriptions of her methods and interpretations of the results are concise and
remain close to the text. They help readers understand what the numbers
represent, but do not delve deeply into interpretations. The observational
nature of this volume leaves many openings for readers to pursue
interpretations. The vast amount of data contained in the database and
summarized in this book provides a firm foundation for future studies. The
database could be made more readily available; de Leeuw van Weenen promised to
provide it in a format that conforms to the Text Encoding Initiative
Guidelines (13), but I was unable to find it online. 

The book has been edited quite thoroughly, as is appropriate for its level of
detail. I noted only a couple of typographical errors. Overall, it is a
complete and precise description of Möðruvallabók and a valuable contribution
to the literature.

REFERENCES

Van Arkel-de Leeuw van Weenen, Andrea. 1987. Möðruvallabók, AM 132 fol. 2
vols. Leiden: Brill.

De Leeuw van Weenen, Andrea. 1997. A Medieval Icelandic manuscript: The making
of a diplomatic edition. TUGboat 18.1:30–36.

Noreen, Adolf. 1970. Altnordische Grammatik I, Altisländische und
altnorwegische Grammatik, Laut- und Flexionslehre, unter Berücksichtigung des
Urnordischen. Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte A4, 5th ed.
Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog. A Dictionary of Old Norse Prose. 1995. Vol
1: a-bam. Copenhagen: The Arnamagnæan Commission.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Bev Thurber is an independent scholar who is interested in historical and
computational linguistics and the history of ice skating.





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