The history and etymology of Old Scandinavian hinn is a disputed matter. One question concerns whether hinn as a contrastive demonstrative indicating ‘the other (one)/the former (one)’ and hinn as a pre-adjectival article, both of which to some extent are still found in present-day Icelandic, are related or not. Another issue concerns the fact that hinn has no immediate parallel in Germanic outside Scandinavia, which has led scholars to assume that it is a Proto-Scandinavian innovation. This paper argues that Old Scandinavian possessed two hinn words with separate backgrounds, one stemming directly from an anciently inherited distal demonstrative, and one from an innovated proximal demonstrative. However, the innovation was no more founded on common Germanic material than the former hinn was. Instead, it arose from the reinforcement of an ancient precursor. This precursor is traceable in early Icelandic enn, which was used as a pre-adjectival article and as a primitive post-nominal definiteness marker.

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corpora when used with sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show.