My blogs will feature some elements from my existing research, This includes #umlaut, including the spread of #rounding, and #breaking.
#EastNorse and #Gutnish, perhaps #Övdalian, have a different story to tell here and may contribute a lot to the reconstruction of how the process originally proceeded.

I attach my first introductory blog on #EastNorse, depicting coming topics.
I will discuss periferal Swedish dialects that originate from a more archaic East Norse than #OldSwedish. I will also by rigorously comparing #WestNorse, #EastNorse and #Gutnish show that they do not derive from 8th century language similar to #OldWestNorse, but a 6th century late #ProtoNorse.
As it seems, that Mastodon does not support PDFs, so I will have to reconsider my format of any future blogs.

My first posting is on #FennoSwedish. In parallel in this chain you find two spontaneous samples from #Pargas between Turku and the Åland Islands.
Old traits common in Finland:
-Neuter & non-referential pronoun ”he” ’it’, also compounded ”hehe” ’it-that’ & ”hete” ’it-there’ -Small words with initial d- in Swedish begin with t- in dialect: ”teh” =”där” ’there’; ”To” =”Du” ’you’; ’tåte” =”dylik-där” ’such there’.
-Short stressed CV-syllables ”sama” ’same’.
-Retained diphthong ”göutar” ’boys’

Before taking on harder subjects, let’s debunk a myth circulating in Finland and Sweden: No! The dialect in #Närpes or #Närpesiska is not the ”oldest” #FennoSwedish dialect! And moreover, it has remarkably little in common with “Swedish spoken in Stockholm in the 1500s” (see link). The myth is fuelled by the impression that “incomprehensible”=“archaic”. In fact Närpesiska is incomprehensible mainly for the opposite reason: it is full of phonological innovations. https://svenska.yle.fi/a/7-1281219

Among dialect scholars in Finland some want to name the dialect of #Kronoby as the most archaic. As a researcher specialised in #vocalism I willingly subscribe to that: unlike #Närpes (and unlike #Icelandic) no secondary diphthongisation and better preserved #OldNorse syllable quantity. Unlike some #FennoSwedish dialects a distinction is maintained between öi (vf. #WestNorse ey) and öu (cf. West Norse au) https://kronomagasinet.wordpress.com/om-krombi/

By and large #WestNorse preserves more of #ProtoGermanic than #EastNorse. An exception is the verbal stem gā/*ga- ’go’, which in #OldSwedish was used in the present tense and at times in the infinitive. Else its inflection was suppleted by forms of the verb ”ganga”.
In West Norse ”gá” is attested very sparsely indeed, and instead ”ganga” is used throughout the paradigm.
In past research there was an idea that gā could have been borrowed from #LowGerman, but today this is not deemed probable. 🧵👇🏻

A further oddity: While Danish and central Swedish has ”gå(r)” from #EastNorse ”gā”, the vocalism in many archaic peripheral dialects of Swedish point to East Norse ”ga-” with a short vowel. Similar conditions concern the verb ”stå” ’stand’ from either ”stā” or ”sta-”. This is astonishing since few other content word stems in Old Norse are known to have been comparably short. The closest parallel would ve the preterits of class 5 strong verbs ie. gǎf ˈgaveˈ & sǎt ˈsatˈ. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.25555.22569/1

Descendants of *ga- and *sta-, where the vowel unexpectedly rhymes with descendants of “dra(gha)” ‘to draw’ and “ta(gha)” ‘to take’, occur in the eastern (near-extinct) dialects of Estonian Swedish in Harju county, in the northernmost dialects of Sweden in Norrbotten and in the #FennoSwedish dialects of Ostrobotnia and East Nyland. Early attestations indicate that this was also originally valid in the rest of Nyland and the south-western provinces of Åboland and Satakunda https://kaino.kotus.fi/fo/?p=article&fo_id=FO_1327b955da7c1120152e50b71df3b002&word=g%C3%A5

The short vowel in peripheral Swedish dialects of the verbal stem ”sta-” ’stand’ could offer a clue to solve a riddle, namely why this verb doesn’t exist with long ō in ancient Germanic. This is very expected since the Indo-European root contains *h2 and *eh2- otherwise always renders *ō in Proto-Germanic. But short -a- could correspond to a vocalised *h2 in a zero-grade stem *sth2-. The problem is no such stem is known for this verb except perhaps *sth2-ye/yo-, which is claimed to give *staj-.