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Wikisource – The Free Library – is a Wikimedia Foundation project to create a growing free content library of source texts, as well as translations of source texts in any language.
September’s featured text
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The Swedish language belongs to a northern offshoot of the Old Germanic, which in course of time gave origin to two slightly differing forms of speech, known to Scandinavian grammarians as Forn-Svenskan, the Old Swedish, and Forn-Norskan, the Old Norse. The former of these was spoken by the Svear and Götar, or ancient Swedes and Goths; while the latter, as the name implies, was the language of the Norsemen, and probably identical with the Norræna, or Dönsk Tunga, of the Northmen who first made themselves known to the nations of Christian Europe.
We have evidence that these two main branches of the Old Northern never deviated sufficiently from each other to interfere with their comprehension by all the Scandinavian peoples, although each possessed certain inherent and persistent characters peculiar to itself, of which traces may still be found in the modern forms of cultivated speech, which we distinguish as Swedish, and Dano-Norwegian. These distinctive survivals of the original twin forms of the Old Northern have been best preserved in the provincial dialects of the northern kingdoms, and considerable light has been thrown on the history of the development of the Swedish language by a study of the various forms of the so-called "bondespråk," or peasant-speech, which still maintain their ground in different parts of Sweden.
Current collaborations
The Monthly Challenge for September contains 64 works. You can help by reading the guide and contributing to the current challenge.
This month:
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The current Proofread of the Month is Recollections of Full Years (1914) by Helen Herron Taft. Recent collaborations: The Heart of Jainism, The Silent Prince, A Journey to Lhasa and Central Tibet, The Tower, Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, The Story of the Flute, The Art of Kissing, Frenzied Fiction, Napoleon, Doom of the Great City |
The current Maintenance of the Month task is Undated works
Recent collaborations: OCR fixes, Missing images, Work licensing Work index revision, Orphans, Proposed policies and guidelines, |
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New texts
Highlights
Poetry from ancient and medieval to romantic and modern, in love and war
Texts, laws, constitutions of many countries
Documents from US history, including Revolution and Civil War
US law: Supreme Court decisions, government documents, presidential addresses
General literature: modern novels and short stories, horror stories, children’s literature, science fiction, drama
Original, encyclopedic, popular articles on relativity, physics, biology, and other sciences