Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1992, Page 122

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Höskuldur Þráinsson og Kristján Árnason
rule (“Tum all instances of initial [khv]... ”) does not work
because of a number of &v-words, such as kvœði ‘poem’,
kveikja ‘tum light on’, kvörn ‘grinder’, etc.
d “Southeastem monophthongal dialect” —> “diphthongal di-
alect” because it involves a simple mle: Tum all monoph-
thongs (/a,e,i,u,ö/) into (corresponding) diphthongs before
/gi/. Once more, the reverse mle (“Tum all diphthongs... ”)
will not work because of words that are supposed to have
diphthongs in everybody’s dialect, such as laugin ‘the pool’,
Ægir (name), eigi ‘not’, etc.
As the reader will notice, we have now listed all the majority dialects, or
spreading dialects, that we did not discuss from a sociolinguistic point
of view in the preceding section. In all cases it is the innovation that wins
out, it seems. Note, however, that it is not tme of all innovations that
they cannot “go back” without involving some sort of a complication
in the mle system, acquisition of new contrasts, etc. We have also
seen examples of preservations that are winning out, such as that of
fricatives (vs. stops) before /ð/ in words like hafði, sagði.
Although we have phrased the linguistic explanations in (20) in terms
of mle generalizations, some of them could equally well be stated by
referring to phonological distinctions. Thus it could be said that the
“hard” dialect distinguishes between aspirated and unaspirated stops
following long vowels and that it is difficult for speakers of the “soft”
dialect to leam to make this distinction. Similarly, it could be argued that
speakers of the [xv] dialect differentiate between [x] and [kh] in initial
position before [v] whereas speakers of the [khv] dialect do not and
have hard time leaming this distinction. Finally, speakers of tlie south-
eastem monophthongal dialect distinguish between monophthongs and
diphthongs before /gi/ whereas speakers of the diphthongal dialect do
not. Hence the latter have a harder time accommodating.
To conclude this section, a few comments on the fate of the “con-
fused” (or “slack-jawed”) pronunciation of the non-high front vowels
/i,u,e,ö/. It would seem that the change ífom “confused” to “correct”