Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1980, Blaðsíða 206

204
Janez Oresnik
-tú,13 and another, the short form, not ending in -tú. E.g. ger was the
short, and gertú the long, form of gera. The facts of Icelandic suggest
that the long form was the basic variant of the second person singular,
from which the corresponding short form was made by aid of a clip-
ping rule: remove the -tú of the long form. E.g. gertú minus tú gave ger.
However, there was also a competing clipping rule in the language,
formulated on the basis of the 2. p. sg. verbal forms that had already
ended in t. The rule was, remove the final ú of the long form. E.g.
kanstú, fórtú minus ú gave kanst, fórt. This clipping rule, formulated on
the basis of certain dissyllabic long and monosyllabic short forms, was
generalised to ALL dissyllabic long forms, with the result that new
monosyllabic short forms in -t (here called the clipped forms) arose.
E.g. gertú minus ú gave gert. One of the reasons why the clipped forms
(e. g. gert) replaced the corresponding old short forms (e.g. ger) may
be that the clipped forms (e.g. gert) are more than the corresponding
original short forms (e.g. ger) similar to the corresponding long forms
(e.g. gertú), i.e. to their respective basic variants. The process by which
the clipped forms came into being is still active and produces the
clipped forms all the time. After the clipped forms had come into being,
all monosyllabic 2. p. sg. verbal forms of Faroese (barring the impera-
tive) ended in t (Zachariasen 1977).
As Zachariasen points out, the clipped forms are not used in southem
Faroese. (For instance, the 2. p. sg. pres. ind. of gera is ger, not gert.)
From the descriptive point of view this is as it should be. For while
southem Faroese does know the long forms such as gertú, it does not
possess the model for the formulation of the mle that produces the
clipped forms (gert, etc.): the 2. p. sg. pres. ind. of the preterite-present
verbs and the 2. p. sg. pret. ind. of the strong verbs do not (any longer)
end in -(s)t in southem Faroese, but are without endings. (E.g. tú kann,
fór, not tú kanst, fórt.) How this state of affairs is to be accounted for
historically is a different problem, most probably one that will never be
solved with certainty, given the paucity of the available information on
the Faroese of the previous centuries.14
13 In contradistinction to Icelandic this tú is never written together with the
verbal form that immediately precedes it; I will, however, resort to this spelling
device here to facilitate the exposition.
14 I thank Kaj Larsen for a discussion of southern Faroese.