ADOLF NOREEN (1854-1925)

Plan and Publication of Noreen’s Vårt Språk¹

John Lotz

Adolf Gotthard Noreen (1854-1925), one of the most eminent and significant Swedish scholars, exerted great influence on generations of Swedish linguists. This scientific activity was attached to the University of Uppsala (student 1871-77, docent 1877-87, and professor of Scandinavian languages from 1887 until retirement in 1915). This scientific œuvre includes original contributions in the description of Swedish dialects, in the historical and comparative analyses of Scandinavian and Germanic languages, and in the treatment of Swedish place names. He also wrote widely used surveys of various Scandinavian and Germanic topics. Noreen was deeply interested in practical pedagogical questions associated with language, especially in the reform of the Swedish orthography. The description and the structure of the Swedish language was in the focus of his interest from the very beginning of his scholarly activities to be fully developed in Vårt Språk.

Vårt språk (Our Language), the magnum opus of the eminent Swedish linguist, Adolf Noreen (1854-1925), has remained a monumental torso of one of the greatest undertakings in the history of grammar. The work was intended to be a large-scale codification of New Swedish, by which Noreen meant the language spoken after the Reformation in the Swedish kingdom, including Finland, and also in the southern territories acquired later. It proposed a thorough descriptive analysis of modern Swedish, both Standard and dialects, and treatment of its historical background. But during the period 1903-24, only about two-thirds of the plan was carried out ; 33 issues were published, totaling 3,328 pages, and of the nine volumes planned only five were completed. The rest was left unfinished and at the death of Noreen in 1925 no further manuscript was found in his literary estate.²

This paper will trace the plan and the long process of the publication of Vårt språk as it can be followed on the covers of the separate issues in which the work was published. It will not treat the general development of Noreen’s linguistic thinking nor the antecedents of Vårt språk, which include important theoretical articles,³ university lectures and seminars at Uppsala,⁴ and the 16-page pamphlets published as outlines for summer courses at Visby and Uppsala, in which nearly all the sections of the planned grammar were briefly treated.⁵

The publication of Vårt språk was announced in 1902 by Gleerup, the well-known publishing house in Lund. The subscription announcement states that no scientific grammar of New Swedish exists as of that date, although a grammar of the mother tongue is a most important tool for linguistic studies and the basis for understanding the laws governing the growth of human language ; that such a work is a prerequisite for good school grammars ; and that its realization is a national duty, for the mother tongue is the richest expression of national individuality and is obligatory study for everyone who wishes to obey the old maxim : know thyself.

The entire work was planned in nine volumes to be published in separate issues, with an index to the whole in the ninth volume.⁶ The publication of the work was promised ‘reasonably fast (skäligen raskt).’

The general plan of the work called for four parts : one introductory section and three grammatical sections which were, according to Noreen’s conception of grammar, phonology, semology (the study of linguistic meaning), and morphology.

The first section, the Introduction, discusses general problems of language and linguistics (the nature of language and its relation to other semiotic systems, its stratification in time, area, social groups, and variation in style ; the field of linguistics and its relation to cognate disciplines, and the structure of grammar) and the background material for grammar (the Indo-European language family ; areal, dialectal, and standard varieties of Swedish ; sources ; history of the Swedish language ; and bibliography).

Noreen’s approach to grammar was original. He regarded language as an artifact which can be looked at—as can any other artifact—from three points of view : from the point of view of material, of content, and of form. Thus, grammar should have three branches, each of which should view the entire speech phenomenon from a special angle : phonology, which should treat the articulated sound ; semology, which should deal with the linguistically formed psychological content ; and morphology, which should account for the way in which the sound material is formed to express the semantic content. He attempted to elucidate these distinctions by analogies, e.g., a certain object can be regarded as a piece of bone (material), having the shape of a cube (content), and serving as dice (form) ; or, as a building composed of bricks (material), in Moorish style (content), and serving as a café (form).⁷ But these analogies are rather far-fetched and not very illuminating.⁸ In modern terminology the three sections would be called phonemics, semantics, and morphemics (including both word formation and syntax). Each of Noreen’s sections is then subdivided into a descriptive-synchronic and an etymological-diachronic subsection. (It should be noted that this was before Saussure made this distinction famous.)

(While it is not the aim of this paper to present a critical evaluation of Noreen’s theory, I should like to point out that in his grammar, the sections on phonology and morphology both treat the signal factor in speech and thus both are opposed to semology. Noreen himself has considerable difficulty in maintaining the three levels : phonology is sometimes correlated with semantics as parallel organization of speech material and speech content respectively, and sometimes morphology and semantics are correlated as dealing with meaningful signals and their referents.)

The phonemic section contains many notions which remind one of recent developments in structuralism and speech analysis. Phonetics is defined as an auxiliary science which treats the physical and physiological aspects of sound as distinct from phonemics, which discusses the ‘articulated’ speech sound.⁹ (Cf. the Projet terminologique of the Prague School.) The chapter on phonetics discusses both articulatory and acoustic phonetics. The articulated speech phenomena are treated under two headings : qualitative phonology and prosodic phonology. In the qualitative aspects of phonology, differential meaning occurs as a mark of a phoneme.¹⁰ (The treatment does not carry out this notion, however, and no pattern of Swedish is presented, but rather an enumeration of impressionistic units from all varieties of Swedish.) The prosodic features are defined—probably for the first time—as contrasts in the sequence. They include, according to Noreen, sonority, intensity, duration, and tone. The chapter on sonority deals with the syllabics and with distribution. In the presentation, various aspects of linguistic function are intermingled : distinctive, constructive, pragmatic, stylistic, and dialectal. (Noreen’s whole approach which uses a rigid physical framework as a point of departure and then proceeds to linguistic analysis, is very much like recent trends in American structuralism, and he encounters the same difficulties. The study of prosodies is original, but it seems clear that sonority is a different type of phenomenon from the other prosodic features ; it is a structuring pulsation in the speech current, whereas the others are modifications just like the qualitative features.)

Publication of Noreen’s Vårt Språk

Top row, arabic numerals : year and month of publication ; left column, roman numerals : volume number ; intersections, arabic numerals, issue number, followed by the last page number of the issue in parentheses ; closed boxes : completed volumes; open boxes : incomplete volumes.

The section on semology is the most original part of Noreen’s work. He defines it as the study of linguistically formed psychological content and distinguishes it sharply from semantics, the study of ‘ideas’ in general, just as phonology is distinguished from phonetics. Semology includes two subdisciplines : the study of categories, and the study of functions (nothing was published on the latter). The study of functions seems to have as its object the treatment of the use of meaning in actual reference, while the study of categories is the classification of meanings into various sub-categories. In the latter he treats problems like : utterance and ‘glosa’, which correspond to autosemantica and synsemantica in traditional terminology. He distinguishes the deictic and symbolic spheres (which later became famous as part of Bidder’s Sprachtheorie). He gives a very elaborate classification of various sentence types and then of word meanings and various grammatical categories. (Noreen’s main difficulty in this section is the obscurity concerning the relation of the semantic part to the linguistic expression, and he is unable to keep the volume free of morphological digressions.)

In the third section, that on morphology, he describes the meaningful signaling units. It is divided into two subsections : the formation of the signal along the lines of the sequence, and classes of such sequences (corresponding to the ‘syntagmatic’ and ‘paradigmatic’ axes in Saussure’s theory). The part on sign formation treats word formation and syntax, that on inflection treats mainly the grammatical paradigms.

According to the original plan, which in its major outline never changed, the section on phonology was to be presented after the Introduction in Volume I and in Volumes II-IV, the section on semology in Volumes V and VI, and the section on morphology in Volumes VII-IX.

The work began to appear in February, 1903, with Issues 1-3 and 5 of Volume I, comprising 468 pages (the entire Introduction and the beginning of phonology), and Issue 4 of the section on semantics—128 pages ; thus, one-sixth of everything that was to be published was out in the first month. But after this auspicious beginning, the continuation was slower, and the promise of the original announcement that the work would be published fast disappears finally from Issue 24 (March, 1917). Issue 9, the concluding number of Volume I, appeared in February, 1907 ; Issues 10, 12, 14-15 of Volume II were published between October, 1907, and August, 1910. This volume concluded the descriptive part of phonetics. The publication of the section on historical phonology had started before the conclusion of the second volume, with Issue 6 of Volume III appearing in August, 1905, but it was not until March, 1912, that the next issue of this section, Issue 17, came out and the last four issues of this volume : 19, 21, 23, and 24, were concluded only in March, 1917. Volume IV began to appear with Issue 27 in December, 1918, and continued with Issues 29, 30, 31, and 33, this being the last to appear, in September, 1924, shortly before the death of Noreen. This issue, however, did not conclude the section on historical phonology, and thus even this section, the farthest advanced and the most widely explored, remained unfinished. The publication of the section on semantics, Volume V, started in February, 1903, with Issue 4, but the continuing issues : 7, 11, 13, 16, and 18, were published more slowly and the volume was completed only in November, 1911. This is all that was published on semantics (no issue of Volume VI, planned as the study of the grammatical functions and etymological semantics, ever appeared). Of the third main section, that on morphology, one volume is complete. It started with Issue 8 of Volume VII in September, 1906, but it was more than eight years before the next issue of this volume appeared : Issue 20, published in September, 1914 ; and it was twelve years before it was finished in April, 1918: Issues 22, 25, 26, and 28. Of Volume VIII nothing was published, and of Volume IX, only Issue 32, dealing with the beginning of the nominal inflection, was published in November, 1923 ; it was the last but one of the published issues.¹¹

During the progress of the work, the announcement of the contents on the cover became more and more detailed concerning the parts already published. The only important change in terminology— reflecting a revised opinion on the question of sound changes—is the replacement of ljudlagar (sound laws) by ljudövergångar (sound transitions) beginning with Issue 6 (August, 1905). There were also lesser shifts in the division of topics among the volumes, but no large scale change in the plans. Beginning with Issue 16 (March, 1911), the treatment of semantic functions is shifted from Volume V to Volume VI, which originally was to cover only etymological semantics ; Volume V, finished in March, 1912, with Issue 18, contains only the study of the semantic categories, and nothing on semantic functions. Issues 25 (March, 1917), 26 (May, 1918), and 27 (December, 1918) indicate—probably by mistake—that Volume VIII will contain etymological morphology and Volume IX, only the index. But beginning with Issue 28 (April, 1919) the entire eighth volume is reserved for syntax ; this arrangement allots part of descriptive morphology, i.e. the study of inflection, to Volume IX which was also to include etymological morphology and the index.

The new spelling of 1906 was introduced belatedly in Issue 27 (December, 1918) ; this is surprising in view of the fact that Noreen was an ardent spelling reformer and was himself the editor of a journal printed in phonetic spelling. Issue 28, however, which concluded Volume VII, remained in the old spelling and thus all five finished volumes are in the old spelling.

The longer and longer delays made necessary additions and corrections to the issues already published ; these were given in the concluding issues of the five finished volumes : I, II, III, V, VII. These contain additions and corrections to the finished volumes and also to the incomplete Volume IV. This results in unwieldy complication in the handling of the book.¹²

(The attached chart shows in the upper row the years throughout which the work was published, each divided into two half-year periods. The numerals in the squares under the year indicate the months in which the issues appeared. In the left column, the volumes are indicated by roman numerals ; in the corresponding intersections, the issue numbers are indicated by arabic numerals, and the last page number of each issue is given in parentheses. Completed volumes are indicated by closed boxes, the incomplete volumes, by broken lines.)

This distorted publication scheme is also reflected in the long-planned German version which was to present Noreen’s basic ideas to the non-Scandinavian public.¹³ When it was finally decided in 1923 to publish the German version without waiting for the completion of the Swedish original, it mirrored the disproportions of the published Swedish sections. Thus, phonology occupies an overwhelming part of the entire book and morphology is treated only very briefly.

The long delays in the publication of Vårt språk are mainly responsible for the lack of influence of Noreen’s work on grammatical thinking in general, in spite of his thorough presentation of the theoretical problems connected with the compilation of a grammar and his wealth in original ideas (separation of the descriptive and historical ; treatment of morphology as a superstructure based on phonetics ; thorough presentation of semantics ; introduction of functional traits in the delimitation of speech sounds and use of the notion of relative contrast for the definition of the prosodic features ; clear-cut distinction between the symbolic and deictic spheres, etc.).¹⁴

Source : John Lotz, ‘Plan and Publication of Noreen’s Vårt Språk,’ Studio Linguistica 8.82-91 (1954). By permission of Studia Linguistica and the author.

1 This paper was presented at Professor Björn Collinder’s seminar in linguistics at the University of Uppsala in 1946 ; most of the incumbents of the philological chairs participated, some of them former students of Noreen, and the author profited greatly from their remarks.

2 Oral information from Adolf Noreen’s son, the late Professor Erik Noreen of Uppsala.

3 ‘Något om ord och ordklasserna’, Nordisk tidskrift, 1879; ‘Accent’, Nordisk Familjebok, Volume I, Supplement, Stockholm, 1895 ; Noreen : Spridda studier, p. 211 ff.; Indogermanische Forschungen I (1892), 95 ff.; Nordisk tidskrift för filologi, 3rd Series, VI, 175 ff.

4 For a list of Noreen’s lectures, I am indebted to the eminent Slavist, the late Professor Tore Torbiörnsson ; he communicated as a personal recollection that from 1892 until the beginning of the appearance of Vårt språk in 1903, the topic of Noreen’s seminars was New Swedish word inflection.’

5 Vårt modersmåls grammatik och dess indelning (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar vid feriekurserna i Visby 1898) ; Inledning till modersmålets grammatik (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar. Sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1893, 2 uppl. 1899) ; Inledning till modersmålets ljudlära (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar. Sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1895, 2 uppl. 1899) ; Grunddragen af modersmålets prosodi (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar. Sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1897, 2 uppl. 1901) ; Inledning till modersmålets betydelselära (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar. Sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1901, 2 uppl. 1903) ; Satsen och dess hufvudarter (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar. Sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1903) ; Inledning till modersmålets formlära (Grundlinjer till föreläsningar vid sommarkurserna i Uppsala 1899, 2 uppl. 1901).

6 In the beginning, it was announced that the index would cover only the first eight volumes ; this was clearly inconsistent since the final chapters of the grammar, treating etymological morphology, were to be in the ninth volume, and it was corrected in Issue 8 (September 1906).

7 Vårt Språk, V, 10.

8 The following is quoted from the German translation : ‘Da die Sprache im wesentlichen ein Kunstprodukt ist (the following words from the Swedish original are omitted in the translation : ‘liksom kläder, boning och verktyg’, ‘like clothes, dwelling, and tools’, I, 50) muss sie der Betrachtung ebensoviele und die gleichen Hauptgesichtspunkte bieten wie jedes andere Kunstprodukt : den des Materiales, den des Inhaltes und den der Form.’

(1) ‘Die Lautlehre oder Phonologie. Diese hat das Material zum Gegenstand, das bei der primären und wichtigsten Sprache, der gesprochenen, "artikulierte Sprachlaute" — bilden, durch die der Ideeninhalt mitgeteilt wird. Die Phonologie darf nicht, wie das mitunter geschehen ist, mit ihrer wichtigsten Hilfswissenschaft, der Phonetik . . . verwechselt werden . . .’

(2) ‘Die Bedeutungslehre oder Semologie. Diese hat den psychischen Inhalt der Sprache zum Gegenstand : die Ideen, die durch die Sprachlaute mitgeteilt werden und so deren "Bedeutung" bilden. Die Semologie ist nicht nur von ihrer wichtigsten Hilfswissenschaft, der "Sprachphilosophie"... streng zu scheiden, sondern auch von dem Teil der Psychologie, der von den Vorstellungen und den noch höhern Bewusstseinsinhalten handelt, sowie auch vor allem von der "Logik",...’

(3) ‘Die Formenlehre oder Morphologie. Diese hat darzustellen, in welch verschiedener Art und Weise das Lautmaterial im Dienste des Bedeutungsinhaltes zu "Sprachformen" gestaltet wird. Die Formenlehre bildet den zentralen und wichtigsten Teil der Grammatik, durch den sie auch von anderen Wissenschaften streng geschieden ist.’

9 Vårt språk, I, 41, 52, 340.

10 Ibid., I, 407.

11 The issues are numbered in the order of their appearance irrespective of the volume to which they belong, but pagination within each volume is consistent. The issues vary in size. The shortest one is the last, Issue 33 (September 1924): 52 pages ; the longest one is Issue 2 (February 1903): 133 pages ; in general, they contain from 4 to 8 fascicles.

12 Thus, additions and corrections occur : in Volume I (completed February 1907) pp. 543-560 ; in Volume II (completed August 1910), to Vol. I on pp. 473-481, to Vol. II on pp. 481-486 ; in Volume V (the third volume to be completed, in November 1911), to Vol. I on pp. 684-691, to Vol. II on pp. 691-693, to Vol. V on pp. 693-700 ; in Volume III (completed March 1917), to Vol. I on pp. 521-539, to Vol. II on pp. 539-540, to Vol. III on pp. 540-547, to Vol. V on pp. 547-549 ; in Volume VII (the last volume completed, in April 1919), to Vol. I on pp. 531-536, to Vol. II on pp. 537, to Vol. III on pp. 537-542, to Vol. IV (which is not complete), on pp. 543, to Vol. V on pp. 543-545, to Vol. VII on pp. 545-548.

13 Einführung in die wissenschaftliche Betrachtung der Sprache (Beiträge zur Methode und Terminologie der Grammatik). Vom Verfasser genehmigte und durchgesehene Übersetzung ausgewählter Teile seines schwedischen Werkes ‘Vårt språk’ von Hans W. Pollak. Halle (Saale), 1923 (viii + 460). This work is often referred to as Noreen-Pollak, as though Pollak were a co-author, but he contributed only the translation and the German examples, and even for these the main part of the work was done by the famous phonetician working then in Sweden, Ernst A. Meyer.

14 For reviews and comments, see the well-known special journals : Indogermanisches Jahrbuch, Tidskrift för nordisk filologi, etc.