I was reading Blake Morrison’s LRB review (archived) of a couple of books by recent Nobelist Jon Fosse when I noticed that his translator, Damion Searls, renders the name of the Norwegian city Bergen as Bjørgvin, presumably reproducing the form in the original text. The Wikipedia article explains:
The Old Norse forms of the name were Bergvin [ˈberɡˌwin] and Bjǫrgvin [ˈbjɔrɡˌwin] (and in Icelandic and Faroese the city is still called Björgvin). The first element is berg (n.) or bjǫrg (n.), which translates as ‘mountain(s)’. The last element is vin (f.), which means a new settlement where there used to be a pasture or meadow. […] In 1918, there was a campaign to reintroduce the Norse form Bjørgvin as the name of the city. This was turned down – but as a compromise, the name of the diocese was changed to Bjørgvin bispedømme.
(Why [w] for v in the Old Norse forms?) Oddly, there are both a Bjørgvin Prison and a Bergen Prison, right next to each other. This passage from the review is of Hattic interest:
Fosse writes in New Norwegian, Nynorsk, one of Norway’s two written forms (Bokmål is the other), most common in western Norway. The fidelity of Damion Searls’s translation is impossible for an outsider to judge but it reads very fluently; it seems Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell was to W.G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary. There’s such carry in the prose that you quickly stop noticing the lack of full stops, though if you pause to examine the resources Fosse uses to move things along from one observation to the next it’s striking to see the alternatives he finds to the ever dependable ‘and’ and ‘but’. On one page I counted ‘I think’ more than a dozen times and – perhaps with a nod to Molly Bloom – there’s many a ‘yes’, as in ‘yes, maybe yes, yes maybe it’s a distance, he thinks, and now he has to go pour himself a little drink’. Joyce had fun with sentencelessness and so more recently did Mike McCormack in Solar Bones and Lucy Ellmann in Ducks, Newburyport. But Fosse’s way with it is more inward and incantatory.
I’ve heard good things about Fosse, but eight hundred pages of “smallish print and narrow margins” with “no paragraphs or full stops” sounds daunting. Maybe in another lifetime.
We know Old Norse v corresponds to Proto-Germanic *w and at some point in early Old Norse it dropped out word-initially before rounded vowels, e.g. Óðinn from Proto-Norse ᚹᛟᛞᛁᚾᚨᛉ (wodinaʀ).
But there is some indication that it began to fall in with the voiced allophone [v] of f early on even in Classical Old Norse, although no doubt there was regional variation.
The situation is probably similar to what took place in Classical Latin. But for convenience, we usually reconstruct [w] for Old Norse v even though its value was probably changing over the period that it was spoken.
Thanks, that makes sense. I had always thoughtlessly assumed that v meant v.
You do not stop noticing the lack of full stops! You are an attentive reader.
I have not tried “Septology” but rather the much shorter “Trilogy”, or as it says at the top of every other page “Triology” (classic Dalkey quality control), which is also set mostly in Bjørgvin.
The prose is a breeze (actual quotation):
“You’re awful, the Girl says
You’re the worst guy in the whole of Bjørgvin, she says
No one’s worse than you, she says
No everything is awful, she says” (p. 100)
We discussed Fosse’s language and Searls’ translations here last fall.
Jon Fosse uses “Bjørgvin” to set the stories outside actual reality. In the real world, the hitorical Bjørgvin is often used to name entities serving a larger district than just the city of Bergen.
Oh, and I heartily recommend the Trilogy. It’s not a hard read.
It happens I’m currently “reading” Fosse’s Septology by listening to the unabridged version on Audible (in three volumes). This, I’ve found, is a good workaround for avoiding squinting for many hours at un-paragraphed and un-full-stopped microprint. (Other than the unconventional paragraphing, the prose is easy to digest.)
In standardized spelling of Old Norse, the symbol used in Bjǫrgvin denotes a vowel that shifted from unrounded to rounded before a following [u] or [w]. Because the place name in question shows such umlaut, the <v> here was clearly [w] at some point. And because this umlaut appears even in some late borrowings into Old Norse, we know that v was pronounced, at least in some dialects, as a labial semivowel until a fairly late date.
Edit: For some reason, the LH comment form doesn’t like the Unicode o with tail, and instead is show it as a C with cedilla, at least on my screen
I see it as you intended it.
We discussed Fosse’s language and Searls’ translations here last fall.
So we did, and by following the link there I see that in the interim Wikipedia has changed the pronunciation from [ˈjʊn ˈfɔssɛ] to [ˈjʊ̀nː ˈfɔ̂sːə]. WTF?
The new pronunciation follows the current IPA conventions for Norwegian on Wikipedia. Based on my limited exposure to Norwegian I do think [ə] is a better symbol for its reduced e than [ɛ]. I would personally in fact use the same symbol for the Swedish reduced e, though Wikipedia has opted for [ɛ] in this case.
I’m not sure how to feel about the way the tones are marked with the IPA pitch diacritics. They’ve gone for the pitch accent of Urban East Norwegian where tone 1 as in [ˈjʊ̀nː] is low and tone 2 as in [ˈfɔ̂sːə] starts high and falls sharply. But in other dialects, probably including Fosse’s own, the contours would be different.
In most other references they simply mark which words have which tone without trying to show them explicitly with IPA pitch diacritics. I can see how it can be more helpful to specify the tone contours, but then you have to choose one dialect.
Thanks for the explanation, and I don’t know how to feel about it either.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read from readers “I was so scared off by the reviews of Septology but I picked it up and it was a page-turner, I loved it.” It’s just journalistic conformism to think that “long sentence no periods” is the thing to say about the book. It is factually false to say that there are no paragraphs — there is plenty of standard dialogue, short paragraphs ending “he said” or “she said,” just without a period at the end — and it’s not really true to say it’s “all one sentence” either, it’s just that the sentences are divided by commas instead of periods, and anyway the translation (and book itself) takes readers’ needs into account. If you can understand people speaking when they do not say “period” out loud at the end of every sentence, then you will have zero problems with Septology.
As for the smallish print and narrow margins, that is a UK-only problem. The Fitzcarraldo one-volume Septology is badly formatted and hard to read (I haven’t seen the new, more deluxe edition yet, so maybe not there). The American edition published by Transit is beautifully designed, lovely to read, and by the way 660 pages long, not “eight hundred.” The book is also available in three smaller volumes (also totalling <800 pages). It is a unique and amazing reading experience and you should read it! Don't be scared off by the nonsense.
Fair enough! I hate reproducing journalistic clichés, and it sounds like a lot of people are finding it a good read (or a good listen — an audiobook version is probably a good idea), so I’ll add it to my list. Thanks for dropping by!
Jongseong Park: Based on my limited exposure to Norwegian I do think [ə] is a better symbol for its reduced e than [ɛ].
In my own Broad Eastern variety, certainly, but Western dialects tend to reduce less.
But in other dialects, probably including Fosse’s own, the contours would be different.
Yes. I’ll even throw out a claim that it’s the contrast between tone 1 and 2 we listen for. How you make it doesn’t matter much as long as there’s a consistent pattern.
Trond Engen, thanks for the explanation! My exposure would have mostly been to Urban East Norwegian.
So it seems to be a similar case to German, where the [ə] tends to be less reduced and is basically an unstressed [ɛ] in Austria or Switzerland.
As I said about Swedish above, I’m personally happy to keep [ə] as the symbol for the unstressed vowel corresponding to written e regardless of the actual realization, perhaps because I’m so used to it from German.
The First Grammarian said it was [w]; that was slightly preclassical though.
The regional variation has not ceased. [w] remains in Älvdalen and in western Jutland.
I don’t think that’s right about Switzerland. Austria (uh… Hinterarlberg), though, yes – in part as a spelling-pronunciation, because MHG [ə] was almost completely lost by the Bavarian-Austrian dialects (and the small remainder became [ɐ]), in part because MHG unstressed -iu seems to have been reduced at most to [ɛ] in the same dialects (some seem to have [e], Swiss [i]), but no further.
It struck me that there are now internet services that provide files combining sound and moving image into a likeness of reality. At one of those I found:
Jon Fosse les frå Septologien (Jon Fosse reading from the Septology)
I read Septology recently. Searls decriptions of both Fosse’s prose and the American edition are correct.
I had planned to read just the first novel of the sequence and then take a break but I enjoyed spending time with the character so I kept reading, yes, that is close enough to “page-turner.”
OK, you’ve added to my impulse to give it a try. I’ve added the Transit paperback to my wishlist and perhaps it will show up under the Christmas tree.
It showed up and I am enjoying it — many thanks to Damion Searls and others for encouraging me! Here’s a passage of Hattic interest:
Glad you’re enjoying it. Maybe it’s time I get around to the Septology too.
Apropos of nothing, TIL I’m at most three degrees of separation from Samuel Beckett. Strange.