long (, ) or overlong (). During the Late Old Swedish period the short root syllables () were lengthened and the overlong root syllables () were shortened, so modern Swedish only has the combinations and . Unlike in modern Swedish, a short vowel in Old Swedish did not entail a long consonant. There were eight vowels in Early Old Swedish: . A vowel shift () occurred during the Late Old Swedish period, which had the following effects: became ( > hus , house) became ( > bok , book) became ( > blå , blue) The consonant sounds were largely the same as in modern Swedish, with the notable exceptions of and , which do not exist in modern Swedish (although the former is preserved in Elfdalian and to some extent also the latter). The Modern Swedish tje-sound ([ɕ]) and sje-sound ([ɧ]) were probably and , respectively, similar to their values in modern Finland Swedish. A similar change can be seen from Old Spanish and to Modern Spanish and . The Proto-Germanic phoneme was preserved in initial sounds in Old Swedish (w-) and did survive in rural Swedish dialects in the provinces of Skåne, Halland, Västergötland and south of Bohuslän into the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is still preserved in the Dalecarlian dialects in the province of Dalarna, Sweden. The -phoneme did also occur after consonants (kw-, tw- etc.) in Old Swedish and did so into modern times in said dialects, as well as in the Westro- and North Bothnian tongues in northern Sweden. Grammar Nominal morphology In Early Old Swedish The most defining difference between Old Swedish and modern Swedish was the more complex grammatical system of the former. In Old Swedish nouns, adjectives, pronouns and certain numerals were inflected in four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative), whereas modern standard Swedish has reduced the case system to a common form and a genitive (some dialects retain distinct dative forms). There were also three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), still retained in many dialects today, but now reduced to two in the standard language, where the masculine and feminine have merged. These features of Old Swedish are still found in modern Icelandic and Faroese; the noun declensions are almost identical. Noun declensions fell under two categories: weak and strong. The weak masculine, feminine and neuter nouns had their own declensions and at least three groups of