Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1980, Page 198

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Janez Oresnik
ants, one with, and the other without, the suffixed pronoun þú, e.g. fœr
and fœrðu of fá (Cleasby-Vigfusson 1957: xxvi-vii). The forms without
the suffixed þú will here be called the short forms. The forms with the
suffixed þú will be called the long forms. Thus fær is a short second
person singular, and færðu a long one.
The geminates that occur in the above oldest paradigms of lesa and
fara were simplified already in pre-Reformation Icelandic (Noreen
1923:210), and the resulting paradigms were as shown in (2):
(2) 1. les
fer
fer, ferðu
fer
fæ
fær, færðu
fær
' 2. les, lestu
3. les
The next, and so far last, step in the development of these paradigms
consisted in the addition of a dental at the end of the three short 2. p.
sg. forms: les f> lest, fer f> ferð, fœr 2> færð (Arpi 1904). The added
dental is either t or ð; t is added to any short second person singular if
that form is monosyllabic and ends in Vs; ð is added to any short
second person singular if that form is monosyllabic and ends in Vr,
where the r either pertains to the root (as in fer-ð), or to the ending (as
in fæ-rð).
I will refer to forms such as lest as the lest type, and to forms such
as ferð, færð as the ferð type. The common name for the short forms
expanded with a dental will be the clipped forms (this in anticipation
of the historical explanation to be suggested below).
The oldest known example of the lest type occurs in Donatus Hoc est
Paradigmata partium orationis Latino - Isl. (Hafniæ 1733, p. 62) where
the form is lest (Jón Þorkelsson 1888-94:5), and in Jón Magnússon’s
grammar of Icelandic dated from the same time, where the form is
eyst of ausa (Björn K. Þórólfsson 1925:112, cf. Finnur Jónsson 1933:
114). The oldest known example of the ferð type is to be found in
Rask’s Kortfattet Vejledning til det oldnordiske eller gamle islandske
Sprog (Kpbenhavn 1832, p. 60) where the form is ferð (Björn K. Þór-
ólfsson 1925:112).
At least since Arpi (1904) the lest and the ferð types have been
explained as due to a faulty analysis of the corresponding long forms,
cf. lestu and ferðu. This idea is undoubtedly correct, and will be elab-
orated in what follows.