League during the 13th and 14th centuries. Many German speakers immigrated to Swedish cities and worked in trade and administration. Accordingly, loanwords relating to warfare, trade, crafts and bureaucracy entered the Swedish language directly from Low German, along with some grammatical suffixes and conjunctions. The prefixes , and that can be found in the beginning of modern Swedish words came from the Low German , and . Some words were replaced with new ones: the native word for window, , was replaced with , (kitchen) was replaced with and (to pay) with . Some of these words still exist in Modern Swedish but are often considered archaic or dialectal; one example is the word (window). Many words related to seafaring were borrowed from Dutch. The influence of Low German was so strong that the inflectional system of Old Swedish was largely broken down. Late Old Swedish In contrast to the stable Early Old Swedish, Late Old Swedish (; 1375–1526) experienced many changes, including a simplification of the grammatical system and a vowel shift, so that in the 16th century the language resembled modern Swedish more than before. The printing of the New Testament in Swedish in 1526 marked the starting point for modern Swedish. In this period Old Swedish had taken in a large amount of new vocabulary primarily from Latin, Low German and Dutch. When the country became part of the Kalmar Union in 1397, many Danish scribes brought Danicisms into the written language. Orthography Old Swedish used some letters that are no longer found in modern Swedish: and were used for modern and respectively, and could stand for both (th as in the) and (th as in thing). In the latter part of the 14th century was replaced with and . The grapheme could stand for both the phonemes and (e.g. (soul), in modern Swedish). The graphemes , , and were used interchangeably with the phonemes and (e.g. (without), in modern Swedish), and could also sometimes stand for the consonant-vowel combinations and : ( or dove). Certain abbreviations were used in writing, such as for (modern , with). The letter combinations , and were often written so that one of the letters stood above the other as a smaller letter, , and , which led to the development of the modern letters , , and . Phonology The root syllable length in Old Swedish could be short (),