Gripla - 01.01.1977, Page 172

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GRIPLA
invariably stand in successive syllables; e.g. önnur, gömul of annar,
gamall. A simplex word such as apótekari ‘pharmaceutical chemist’ has
dat. pl. apótekurum, never öpótekurum, because of the ó and e inter-
vening between the stressed and unstressed a’s of apótekari.
In simplex words comprising more than two syllables “a secondary
stress falls on the odd syllables, the third, the fifth, etc., e.g. 'kenna.ri
‘teacher’, 'kenna.rarnir ‘the teachers’, 'prófes.sorar.nir ‘the professors’”
(Benediktsson 1963b:146). (Such stresses are here called RHYTHMI-
CAL; the term SECONDARY stress is here reserved for the main
stresses of non-initial constituents of compound words.) There is no
correlation between such rhythmical stresses and the alternants /ö, y/
of u-umlaut, cf. dat. pl. 'héröð.um versus 'héruð.um of hérað ‘district’;
dat. pl. 'karöt.um of karat ‘carat’ versus 'alman.ökum of almanak ‘cal-
ender’. Also, þjóð-félögin ‘the societies’ contains ö no matter how the
rhythmical and secondary stresses are distributed. (There are several
possible pattems of stress, see Benediktsson ibidem.)
If the first constituent of a bipartite compound word is monosyllabic,
as it often is, the second constituent often loses its constituent initial
secondary accent, and the compound as a whole thus assumes the
phonetic shape of a simplex word; Benediktsson 1963b:146, Kress
1963:11. An example is samband ‘connection’, without any stress on
-band. The loss of the secondary stress under these conditions does not
lead to the violation of the principle that only the inflected (normally
last) constituent in any compound word undergoes synchronic u-um-
laut: dat. pl. samböndum. On the other hand, such compound words,
appearing at least optionally in the disguise of simplexes, may have
been a diachronic source of Final umlaut, or at least one of its supports:
samböndum has the rhythmic pattem of, say, albönskum. In fact, it is
sometimes difficult, or even impossible, to decide whether a compound
of the samband type, pronounced with one primary stress accompanied
by rhythmical stresses if appropriate, is a compound or a simplex from
the synchronic point of view.
Nothing HAS to intervene between a u-umlauted vowel and the end
of the stem (not word!) in which it appears; cf. the 3p. pl. pret. spjöðu
of the archaic verb spja ‘scorn, despise’.6 What CAN intervene in the
6 For the data on spja see Þórólfsson 1925:116.