1600-luvun proosan ja runokielen potentiaaleja

• Pirkko Forsman Svensson

Avainsanat: modukset, potentiaali, vanha kirjasuomi

Abstrakti

Potentials in 17th century prose and verse (englanti)

2/1996 (100)

Pirkko Forsman Svensson (fi)

Potentials in 17th century prose and verse

The potential mood is the rarest of the morphological moods in Finnish, and it occurs mostly in the written language. It expresses epistemic possibility, and is common in text-types containing probabilistic claims such as news texts and politics. The potential is also frequent in eastern dialects and some Ostrobothnian dialects; in western dialects it is generally very rare. It may therefore be assumed that it is also rare in old written texts based on western dialects.

The article examines the frequency and functions of the potential in written Finnish sermons from the second half of the 17th century, and compares its usage there with descriptions in early grammars, and with other old literature, both prose and poetry. The 17th-century grammars (Petraeus and Martinius) described the potential form lieneek (potential of the verb olla 'be', 3rd p. present, plus interrogative suffix) as an "interrogative adverb"; in his poetics Petraeus also mentions the form tiennem as a synonym of the indicative tiedmme 'we know'. A third grammarian, Vhael, gave a full inflection of the potential present, and also pointed out some dialectal variants (such as ollen for lienem).

The earlier comparative material comprised (prose) the works of Agricola and the 1642 Bible, and (poetry) the hymns of Jaakko Finno and Hemminki Maskulainen. Later material included various 17th-century translations, the first collection of proverbs (1702), and a number of occasional poems from the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th.

Occurrences of the potential were only found in some of the texts. In the 17th-century sermons there were about 20 instances, and in Agricola about 80. The first Bible translation has 60 instances, of which 40 are from Agricola. Of the few potentials in the sermons, most are in citations from the Bible or from hymns; the examples with more independent status are phrases with lienee, ollee, familiar from south-western dialects. Potentials in the other prose texts were also in hymn citations, originating mostly from Hemminki Maskulainen's hymnal. Hemminki's lines abound with potentials, but they usually have a purely indicative function and are motivated by rhyme or rhythm.

The needs of rhyme or rhythm also explain the use of the potential in other verse texts of the period, e.g. in the occasional poems. Among the most favoured rhymes are lienee - tiennee and lienee - vienee, which are already found in Finno. Poets who sought a folk-poetry rhythm (J. Cajanus, M. Salamnius and others) used the potential in order to create a trochaic tetrameter: e.g. antanepi for antaa, etsinette for etsitte. The needs of this metre, and to some extent of rhyme, also explain the use of the potential in Florinus' proverbs, where the form has a clearly indicative function. Both in proverbs and in occasional verse the potential often rhymes with an indicative form: etsinepi - halaapi.

During the 18th century, poems were increasingly written in the Kalevala metre, and more and more writers emerged from outside South-West Finland, expecially from Ostrobothnia. The Ostrobothnian Bartholdus Vhael, who lived around the turn of the century, described the potential as a mood in his grammar, and gave the forms sstnepi, sstnevi as Ostrobothnian dialectal variants. In poems and proverbs potential forms were used mainly for reasons of rhyme and rhythm, but they can sometimes be read as expressing hesitation or supposition. Although many a writer of occasional verse used the potential quite naturally, in the manner of folk poetry, it was more than a hundred years before this mood, familiar to East-Finnish and Ostrobothnian speakers, became established in the standard language.