Gripla - 01.01.1982, Side 198

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GRIPLA
teenth century), see Hreinn Benediktsson 1977:42 fn. 1. The spelling
ei occurs in AM 764 4° (miscellaneous material, written in the 1370’s):
its page 15r contains beidi ‘bæði’.4 It is interesting to note that both
these manuscripts contain iæ-spellings as well, see (13) and (19) above,
so that iæ- and æi-spellings seem to be related: both directions of the
diphthongisation of œ were possible in the same dialect. A thorough
philological investigation of this situation, which would doubtless bring
additional æi and ei for ‘æ’ to light, remains a desideratum. In my
opinion the æi- and ei-spellings for ‘æ’ show that the diphthongisation
of æ had begun by the middle of the fourteenth century. (This squares
nicely with the assumption mentioned in the preceding paragraph that
œi had passed to [ai] by the middle of the fifteenth century, at least in
some parts of Iceland.)
Stefán Karlsson 1960 §19.61 pointed out the parallelism between
the diphthongisation of æ to iœ and the diphthongisation of é to ie.
Hreinn Benediktsson 1977:29, 42 fn. 1 saw in the diphthongisation of
œ to iœ and œi a part of the more general diphthongisation of old non-
high long vowels é, œ, á, ó (although he also stated, p. 42 fn. 1, that he
had included á and ó in the list for pattern congruity only). As is well
known, the diphthongisation of é took two opposite directions, to ei
and to ie (of which ie prevailed); similarly the diphthongisation of œ
resulted in iœ and æi (of which œi > [ai] prevailed). I fully agree that
there must be some connection between é 7> ei/ie and æ > œi/iæ. In
particular, I submit that æ > æi/iæ is an extension of the diphthongis-
ation process from é to a sound of the same natural class, namely æ.
Witness that according to the accepted view the diphthongisation of é
began earlier than the diphthongisation of æ. It is often the case that a
sound change first takes place in one or more sounds, and then, after
some time has elapsed, spreads to one or more related sounds. (For an
Icelandic example of this type see Höskuldur Þráinsson 1980.) The
extension of the diphthongisation process from é to œ gave the richest
results in the north and maybe in the Breiðafjörður region, that is,
where the reflex iæ beside œi also arose. This suggests that the diph-
4 Another ei for ‘æ’ occurs in line 10 of document no. 14 (Skagafjarðarsýsla,
1340) in ed. Stefán Karlsson 1963: eifinlinga [sic] ‘æfinliga’. This instance of ei for
‘æ’, although it fits into the picture chronologically, can be dismissed as a mere slip
of the pen for efin- ‘æfin-’ (thus Stefán Karlsson 1960 §19.41) or as a folk-etymo-
logical reshaping in accord with the adverb ei, ey ‘ever’.