Talk:hvener

RFV discussion: February–April 2016
User:Dreysman, a native Swedish speaker, created this entry, and User:LA2, also a native Swedish speaker, says "There has never been such a word in Swedish. "vener" (without h-) was the old spelling and is the current one." —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:23, 7 February 2016 (UTC)


 * We might both be native speakers of modern Swedish, but no-one writes natively in the old spelling (with hv-) that this article claims to represent, the one that was abolished in the 1906 spelling reform. I challenge you all to find a book (from before 1906) that uses this spelling. I give you this counterexample from 1876, where several other words are spelled with "hv-" (hvad, hvarifrån, hvilka), but "vener" is spelled without hv. --LA2 (talk) 06:10, 7 February 2016 (UTC)
 * The definition line says "Obsolete spelling". Obsolete means no longer used. So the entry is accurate by your own admission, right? Taken back. Let us see whether we can find attesting quotations. . --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:41, 7 February 2016 (UTC)


 * If Dreysman thought this was an old spelling of the word for veins, it seems odd that he created the plural (*h)vener and not the singular (*h)ven. Köbler has hvener as an alt form of in Old Norse. Both capitalized and uncapitalized it also seems to exist as an obsolete spelling-and-typographical- variant of Hühner in (Old or Middle High) German. And it means something in Danish; Danish author Niels Birger Wamberg uses it in Mens tid er and Laurids Kristian Fahl uses it in Ordmagneten. I haven't seen Swedish uses of it. - -sche (discuss) 09:22, 7 February 2016 (UTC)


 * , are either of you familiar with this in Swedish? As I wrote above, "If Dreysman thought this was an old spelling of the word for veins, it seems odd that he created the plural (*h)vener and not the singular (*h)ven", so perhaps it doesn't mean "veins" but something else. ("Veins", i.e. "vener", has apparently never been spelled with an 'h', according to LA2's comment above.)
 * , any idea what this means in Danish (if anything)? It's used by Niels Birger Wamberg and Laurids Kristian Fahl in some books.
 * - -sche (discuss) 02:29, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, hvener is the plural form of the noun hvene (the grass species Agrostis) (Swedish ven, Norwegian kvein, English whin) or the non-past form of the verb hvene, which seems to be a (non-standard?) variation of vene, cognate to German weinen. Can't quite exactly see how it relates to this, though. Mulder1982 (talk) 08:27, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I have personally not come across this form. I looked it up in an old version of SAOB and I couldn't find neither hven nor hvener. However, a Swedish Wikipedia article (here) lists hvener meaning "grass" (and let's not forget Hven, the old spelling of Ven – an island in the Øresund strait), but also mentions that ven(er) ("vein(s)") was spelled without h even before the spelling reform. --Robbie SWE (talk) 09:56, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Without knowing any Swedish, I wouldn't a priori expect a loanword from Latin to ever have been spelled hv-. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:08, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
 * I've come late to this discussion, so excuse me if I've missed something already said. A few points of clarification:
 * The present day Swedish word "ven" has two meanings:
 * a vein (blood vessel)
 * Agrostis or bentgrass (a genus of grasses)
 * SAOB is the grand dictionary of the Swedish Academy; it would be the place to go, as mentions, but the problem is that the SAOB only covers the letters A to TÖVLA at the present moment; the V part hasn't been completed yet. So that doesn't help us.
 * The Swedish Academy also publishes a "word list of the Swedish language", SAOL, and allows for a comparative historical search of different editions of this list and a similar earlier work. Such a search shows that in the lexicographical works of 1853, 1874, 1889 and 1900 there was a word "hven". Reading the corresponding entries, this spelling only refers to the genus of grasses. In 1900 the word "ven" (meaning "vein") appears alongside "hven". In later editions, the two words are both spelled "ven".
 * Thus it seems that in 18th century Swedish the word "ven" (meaning bentgrass) was indeed spelled "hven" and could theoretically have a plural "hvener" ("bentgrasses"), although some of the entries say that the word is only used in the singular.
 * It also appears that the word "ven" (meaning vein) was never spelled "hven", which makes sense as it is a comparatively recent loan from Latin "vena" (as notes), and so there's no source for the h- (except by confusion).
 * As for Danish, the two occurrences that mentions both seem to refer to a plural of "hvene", a Danish cognate of the above-mentioned Swedish word for "bentgrass", as  (hei Johan Petur!) mentions. Personally I don't remember ever having come across the word, and the two occurrences in fact mention that hardly anyone knows the meaning of that word.
 * —Pinnerup (talk) 21:56, 8 April 2016 (UTC)
 * that's very informative; thank you! I've added the "bentgrass" sense to ven and added hven with two citations. However, I haven't found any citations of the plural. This has some info on the etymology. - -sche (discuss) 23:07, 8 April 2016 (UTC)


 * RFV-failed (Swedish entry), per the discussion above. The word is plausible — the singular hven does exist and hvener would be the expected plural — but apparently unattested. - -sche (discuss) 22:02, 17 April 2016 (UTC)