Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1982, Side 313

Ritdómar
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could be accounted for in the same way, e. g. dagbók ‘diary’, dagskrá ‘programme’
daglegur ‘humdrum', dagstofa ‘living room’ etc." The phonological behaviour of such
words goes hand in hand with thcir largcly unprcdicatable scmantics, which seems to
mcan that they have to be entered in the lexicon.
The morphological analysis of the lexicon and rules of word-formation might also
explain why there are long vowels in the first syllables of notkun ‘usage’, litka ‘colour,
v.’, and nytka ‘use, v.’ if we could justify # before the suffixes -kun, -ka (cf. nota ‘use,
v.’, litur ‘colour, n.’, nyt ‘use, n.’).7 An alternative and probably more interesting possi-
bility is the suggestion for which there is some evidence in other languages (Gussmann
1980:69-70) to the effect that some rules of word-formation take as their input phonetic
representations of thcir bases. This seems also to be an attractive possibility for the
interpretation of some Icelandic back formations which are troublesome for Árnason’s
analysis (pp. 52-54). Devcrbal nouns such as pukr ‘secrecy’ sötr ‘act of sipping', kjökr
‘act of wailing’ have a long vowel in viólation of Árnason’s lcngth rule (since these
words seem to be monosyllabic — the syllable thus ending in two consonants). Note
that these forms present no problcm for the traditional account of vowel length or
for the position which would back-derive them from the surface pukra, sötra, kjökra
by truncation and the accompanying change of the grammatical paradigm (a morphol-
ogical operation which is quite common, for example, in Polish). Árnason seems in fact
to be suggesting something like this (pp. 52-54).
Árnason’s analysis and my critical comments indicate that the rule of vowel length
in Modern Icelandic is complex in a way which defies available frameworks. Future
research will hopefully shed more light on this process and the process itself is bound
to enrich our understanding of linguistic organisation. It is for this reason that I cannot
accept Árnason’s pessimistic assessment of his own analysis when he says that „the
account of morphophonemic and phonotactic regularites given above is not strictly valid
as a synchronic description of any stage in the development of Icelandic, either as
accounting for any sort of „psychological reality" or an exhaustive account of the lin-
guistic begaviour of present-day speakers, but it is still valuable as accounting for certain
facts about Icelandic" (p.56).
2. History of the length rule in Icelandic
2.1
In view of the serious doubts that Árnason’s analysis of the Modern Icelandic length
rule is open to, one is bound to approach the diachronic section of his monograph
with some scepticism. The facts of the great quantity shift (Haugen 1976:258) are well
known to a student of Scandinavian and of Germanic at large: out of the relatively
free distribution of vocalic and consonantal length in the old language — VC, V:C,
b But for some reason dagheimili has a long vowel in dag-, perhaps because the
following -h- somehow inhibits weakening of the # since it is normally only found
word initially.
It is not surprising from this point of view that some of these at least also occur
with short vowels (but then sometimes with accompanying further processes like spiran-
tisation of t to þ in notkun for instance — cf. fn. 5).