að spjallast við á Hviids

Praised be the forbearance of my Danish friend, who listens patiently while I alternate between murdering his language, largely in the form of names poorly pronounced, and rambling about things linguistic in general. Over a couple of glasses of red wine imbibed at the fabled Hviids Vinstue, and after producing several novel variations of the pronounciation of "Hviids," I proceded to test my companion's endurance with a lengthy speech on the present progressive in Scandinavian and Icelandic. I keep meaning to chase down the story of what, in fact, is going on here.

A Norwegian attempting to say that he is speaking would write.

Jeg sitter og snakker.

Literally, this means "I sit and talk," but the construction is used to express an ongoing activity in the present. Certain verbs are valid, officially, for forming this present progressive, according to whether the speaker is sitting, walking, lying, or simply busying himself, respectively:

Jeg sitter og snakker.
Jeg går og snakker.
Jeg ligger og snakker.
Jeg driver og snakker.

Other verbs are not valid. However, I have seen in informal writing (specifically, a note scrawled and tacked onto a dormitory door) a parallel construction with the verb to be, være:

Jeg er og spiller piano.

Clearly also a present progressive ("I am playing piano," lit. I am and play piano) and a thought-provoking one, since modern Icelandic does use vera (to be) in its own present progressive:

Ég er að spila piano.

But this would be parallel to and even less standard Norwegian sentence than the one above, namely:

Jeg er å spille piano.

Now, spoken Norwegian does not distinguist between og (and) and å (the infinitive particle), and on top of that, the final -r of the present conjugation is indistinct or absent in many dialects, and thus a common native error in writing is of exactly the form of the sentence above, though with one of the approved verbs in the auxilliary position. Thus:

Jeg sitter å snakke.

When foreigners are taught Norwegian, a great fuss is made about not making this error, and honestly, I have never seen a foreigner be tempted. It's a native thing, I think, like þágufallssýki in Iceland.

But how interesting that the native temptation is there. Að is the relative of the particle å in Norwegian (Danish at, Swedish att, Old Norse at), and it brings to mind yet another present progressive construction, this time from slightly antiquated English:

I am a-playing piano.

Or more familiarly, from many a ballad (mang en ballade):

When I was a-walkin' one morning in May
I met a pretty fair maid and unto her did say ....

That outdated English particle a that looks suspiciously like að, å, and the rest has left the language, it would seem, but the whole thing makes me wonder if there is not some historical present progressive underlying this all, one which was standardized according to one analysis in Icelandic (to be + að + infinitive) and another in for example Norwegian (to sit, walk, lie, busy oneself + og + simple present).

I keep telling myself that I really must track this down sometime.