Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2000, Blaðsíða 178

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SUMMARY
‘Prefixed prepositions in medieval manuscripts’
Keywords: orthography, clitics, prefixes, manuscript studies, scribal conventions
In this note the author considers the scribal convention of prefixing monosyllabic
prepositions to the following word, found in some of the medieval Icelandic manu-
scripts. He points out that this convention does not seem to be very common in the
very oldest manuscripts (12,h century) but is quite common in the 13th century and
until the middle of the 14,h. Then it becomes less common again and in the 16,h cen-
tury it virtually disappears. Interestingly, it never seems to have been used much in
formal letter writing or official documents (diplomas). Preliminary investigations
indicate, however, that this convention was linguistically govemed in that it mainly
holds for prepositions (e.t. /' ‘in’ and á ‘on’) but is rarely used in the case of homopho-
nous verbs (e.g. the verb form á ‘own(s)’). It also seems to be relatively more com-
mon to attach prepositions to words beginning with a consonant than to words begin-
ning with a vowel, possibly because adding prepositions to words beginning in vo-
wels might be more likely to create ambiguous forms. Finally, the author points out
that he has only taken the very first steps in the investigation of this phenomenon and
that further investigations are called for. Once they have been carried out, it is con-
ceivable that this phenomenon might be used as an aid in the dating of old manu-
scripts.
Már Jónsson
Heimspekideild Háskóla Islands
Nýja Garði
IS-101 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
marj@hi.is