Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1980, Blaðsíða 205

On the Dental Accretion
203
Oresnik 1980, the clipped indicative could. I will explain this as
follows. The use of the clipped imperative must have been quite limited
when the modern norm was being established in the nineteenth century,
and that limited usage was not noticed, or not taken seriously, by the
prescriptive grammarians, so that the incorporation of the clipped
imperative into the modern norm has not even been discussed, witness
the lack of pertinent statements in the grammatical literature of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other hand, the clipped indi-
catives had such essential usage in the informal language that one could
not fail to notice them. Therefore the incorporation of the clipped indi-
catives into the modem norm was discussed (for an unsympathetic atti-
tude see Guðbrandur Vigfússon 1857:163), and eventually answered
affirmatively (as any twentieth century grammar of modem Icelandic
witnesses).
2.
2.0
The assumption that the long form is the basic variant of the Ice-
landic imperative singular and of the 2. p. sg. pres. ind., has helped us
understand the origin of the dental accretion in the so-called clipped
forms of Icelandic. I will now use this same idea to try and explain
some typologically related phenomena of Faroese and the old West
Germanic languages.
2.1
In modern Faroese, the monosyllabic 2. p. sg. pres. ind. verbal forms
end in -t, e. g. gert of gera, býrt of búgva, etc. (see Zachariasen 1977).12
Zachariasen sees in the -t an innovation of Faroese, due to the gradual
movement, within verbal forms such as ger, býr to which the personal
pronoun tú had been added enclitically, of the t of the pronoun to the
end of the preceding verbal forms. The movement has been promoted
by the 2. p. sg. pret. ind. of the strong verbs, which ends in -(s)t, e.g.
fórt, gekst, and by the 2. p. sg. pres. ind. of the preterite-present verbs,
which also ends in -(s)t, e.g. skalt, kanst.
Originally each second person singular form (barring the imperative)
had two morphological variants, one, the long form, ending in enclitical
12 My attention has been drawn to this paper by Björn Hagström.