NORSEMEN IN NORTH AMERICA— BR0NDSTED 395 



The Kensington stone inscription dates itself to 1362, but is consid- 

 ered by many investigators to be a falsification, made toward the close 

 of the nineteenth century. 



Orthography and phonetics. — The terminal vowels are weakened to 

 e except in mptir, peno^ and perhaps illu; this does not agree with 

 either Old Swedish or modern Swedish, rr in nt>7T, norrmen., is mod- 

 ern Swedish orthography ; the medieval usage was r, west is a bor- 

 rowed form which makes its first appearance in early modern Swedish. 

 from is unknown in Old Swedish. The spelling forms rise and Pep 

 are unknown in Swedish. The last three forms can scarcely be ex- 

 plained otherwise than as intrusions of English (American). In the 

 orthography, however, the most decisive criterion is the use of j in 

 skjar; in the Middle Ages i and j (the long i) are paleographic var- 

 iants; no distinction according to sound values — i as a vowel, j as a 

 consonant — appears until the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. 



Inflection. — The substantives lack case infl.ection and the verbs 

 plural inflection. Sporadic examples may occur in Old Swedish, but 

 consistent use is unknown. In particular, the use of the singular for 

 the plural in the verbs is remarkable ; according to Wessen this has its 

 place in recent Swedish — including the spoken language, beginning 

 with the seventeenth century, wore before the neuter plural skip is a 

 modern Swedish form (Old Swedish war) . illu (if this is the correct 

 interpretation) is the only regular Old Swedish case form, peno 

 occurs only once in Old Swedish, as a dative neuter singular. 



Syntax. — 10 mans, genitive singular after a numeral is unknown in 

 Swedish and is more probably an English plural form. 10 man, sin- 

 gular after a numeral does not occur until modern Swedish (possibly 

 through German influence). 



Vocabulary. — The most discussed word in the inscription is 

 oppagelsefarp (expedition, journey), because opdagelse, opdage (dis- 

 covery, discover) have no place in the Middle Ages. Supporters of 

 the genuineness of the inscription assert that the medieval Swedish 

 sources are of such a nature that the concept of discovery of new land 

 does not occur in them; and S. N. Hagen, the latest to discuss the 

 word, also attaches much importance to the fact that it was con- 

 tained in East Frisian, a neighbor language to the Scandinavian, 

 with transitive application in the sense of "bringing to light." None 

 of these arguments are relevant, however. The East Frisian opdagen, 

 which Hagen cites after Falk and Torp, is taken from a modern 

 dialect dictionary; East Frisian is a Low German dialect and the 

 occurrence of the word in Middle Low German (and Middle 

 Dutch) is just as hypothetical as in medieval Scandinavian. If it 

 were lacking only in medieval texts, this might be attributed to the 

 character of the sources; but it also applies to the subsequent period — 



