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The meeting ofcentral and local authority : Studies on village by-laws in Uppland
No full textThe Swedish village by-laws are a collection of rules for coexistence in a village which evolved during the 18th and 19th centuries. The dissertation takes its starting point in an edition of Byordningar från Mälarlänen (Village By-Laws in the Lake Mälar districts) containing about 400 by-laws from the central part of Sweden, and is a limited review of that edition at the same time as it gives a systematic survey of certain aspects specified in the by-laws. These aspects were added as the result of an official proposal in 1742 containing a model on how a by-law should be constructed. The question is asked whether the directives of the Government were formulated when they reached the local level, or whether they were redesigned and adapted to suit the local situation. The village by-laws in the Mälar counties differ in form and in content depending upon the official proposal on by-laws from 1742. The village by-laws were originally discussed in connection with the changes in agriculture, and thus concerned such sectors as farming methods, fencing, grazing, the right to certain proportions of the village's resources. The local conditions in the village are reflected in, for example, the rules on the length of the grass for grazing. There were different kinds of such by-laws, e.g., by-laws for individual villages and by-laws for parishes (approved at a parish meeting). The initiative of the Government in requiring village by-laws gave different results in different counties. Large parts of Uppsala county are without forest land. The fences and the system of enclosing fields are therefore of particular interest in a discussion on the village by-laws. I have demonstrated that their origin and acceptance in Swedish villages and parishes can be placed in political, chronological, social and functional contexts.Diss. Uppsala : Univ.</p
Vrist - brist - rist : Development of old initial wr in Scandinavian, particularly Swedish, dialects
No full textThe Germanic initial sound combination wr (e.g. in *wrītan 'write') has not been preserved in any standard language. In the Scandinavian languages the development of this sound combination has resulted in five different initial sounds or sound combinations, namely rw, r, w, br and vr. The aim of this study is to describe the occurrence of these sound combinations, and to explain their age and origin. A limited number of words, mainly from Swedish dialects, has been investigated. The Swedish material has been assembled in a collection that has largely also been mapped, and so has a collection of Norwegian dialect material. The result shows that br is frequent in the Swedish dialects and that it also occurs in Trøndelagen and Østlandet in Norway, and on Jutland. R is widespread in Norway and occurs in Sweden in some words in Norrland, Dalarna, Värmland, Dalsland, Uppland and on the island of Gotland. Rw has been documented in Upper Dalarna, and w in the same area, as well as in the Kalix dialect in northernmost Sweden. The author demonstrates that the Norwegian loss of w might have started already in the 6th century in western Norway. The loss on Gotland is independent and can be demonstrated in Old Gutnish. The metathesis rw is found in Swedish and Norwegian 13-14th century sources from Uppland, Västmanland, Östergötland and southeastern Norway. The developments wr > r and wr > rw probably have their roots in a difference between the west Norwegian wr and the east Norwegian and Swedish war which is documented from PrimScand times. W is a secondary development of rw. The change wr > br can be dated by place-name material to the early 15th century. The change wr > vr appears to have taken place at approximately the same time. The author demonstrates that the result, wr > br or wr > yr, is apparently governed by certain phonetic factors. The failure of the Germanic wr to survive depends on the combination being phonetically complex. The risk that w would be lost was therefore considerable. However, differentiating forces worked for its retention. All developments emanating from wr, apparently disparate, can be seen as features of a larger process where a general linguistic tendency towards a weakening of sounds is confronted by conservative forces, with the above results as a consequence.Doktorsavhandling vid Uppsala universitet 1991</p
