vegfarandi wrote: ↑Wed Jul 21, 2021 1:53 pm
Icelandic retained -s in the copula well into the second millennium: ek em, þú est, hann/hún/þat es… The Sagas were mostly written in the 1300s and some of them have these forms vs. the -r forms.
At least according to Jackson Crawford, the 2sg form
*est is actually not attested in Old Icelandic manuscripts (or maybe just attested once), although it is sporadically attested in Norwegian manuscripts. The 3sg form
es is well attested in Icelandic manuscripts, though, as are the past indicative forms
vas and
vast and the infinitive
vesa.
https://journals.lub.lu.se/anf/article/ ... 762/17010/
(I’m not fully convinced by his arguments about the etymology of
ert, which derives the form from another root, but his notes about the difference in distribution between the different forms are still interesting).
In Old Swedish manuscripts, on the other hand, I think only 2sg
äst and 3sg
är are attested (with spelling variation), not
*ärt or
*äs. Also, from what I understand, only r-forms are attested for the infinitive (
vara or
vära) and the 1sg and 3sg past indicative (
var) but for the 2sg, both are attested (
vast and
värt, not sure about
?vart).
Swedish 3sg
äst was eventually replaced by the same form as the 3sg,
är (never by
*ärt), but
äst is, at least sporadically, still used in writing well into the 18th century. The 1sg
äm was replaced by
är at an earlier time.