Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 239

THE SCAND. COMMUNITY OF LANGUAGE 23 3
probably also make for greater ease. Children might be taught
to count femtien, femtito, femtitre, etc., and banks and business
organizations should be asked to facilitate the transition by
adopting the new usage.
Unfortunately, there exist hardly any comparative investi-
gations of the vocabularies and idioms of the Scandinavian
languages. Such investigations would be highly useful. As a case
in point we may mention the fact that abstracts formed by the
addition of the suffix -else are much more frequent in Danish
and Norwegian than in Swedish. On one hand we have the
Danish Forkortelse shortening, Anstrengelse exertion, Begravelse
burial, Fortsættelse continuation, Oversættelse translation, Over-
raskelse surprise, Indvielse consecration, Omgivelse surroundings,
Henrykkelse rapture, Anelse presentiment, Nydelse enjoyment,
Prevelse examination, and on the other the Swedish förkortning,
anstrangning, begravning, fortsdttning, översdttning, överrask-
ning, invigning, omgivning, hanryckning, aning, njutning, pröv-
ning. Cf. also Danish Lettelse relief, Prydelse adornment and
Swedish lattnad, prydnad; Danish Dyrkelse adoration, Æng-
stelse anxiety, Fortvivlelse despair and Swedish dyrkan, dngslan,
förtvivlan; Danish Forglemmelse forgetfulness, Swedish glömska;
Danish Indflydelse influence, Modtagelse reception, Lidelse suf-
fering and Swedish inflytande, mottagande, lidande (Swedish
lidelse corresponds to Danish Lidenskab, and means “passion”);
Danish Tilværelse existence and Swedish tillvaro; Danish Mis-
forstaaelse misunderstanding and Swedish missförstand, etc. We
ought to know more about such general distinctive features of
our several languages than we do at present.
The idea of a movement to promote inter-Scandinavian
language unity is of comparatively recent date, in fact it can
hardly be said to be more than ten years old. In my under-
graduate days the subject was never so much as mentioned in
Swedish university circles. That there had once been an important
Scandinavian conference to discuss questions of Scandinavian
orthography, viz. in 1869, had been completely forgotten.
Linguists were still fairly unanimous in supporting the phonetic
principle in questions of spelling. It therefore caused some stir