Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2004, Page 49

Um Moldhaugnaháls út í Fjósa og Fjörður
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SUMMARY
‘Um Moldhaugnaháls út í Fjósa og Fjörður. Analogical Developments in Some Plural
Place Names’
Keywords: historical morphology, analogy, place names
A number of Icelandic plural place names show morphological developments that
cannot be seen among ordinary nouns. In the paper, five categories of such develop-
ments are discussed, starting with an overview of the data in section 2:
(1) Masculine plural place names become feminine (2.1): three types can be dis-
tinguished, as illustrated in table 1\ the largest one comprises masculines with
nom. plur. -ir, acc. -i becoming feminines with nom. plur. -ir, acc. -ir.
(2) Feminine plural place names become masculine (2.2): the data falls into four
categories, as shown in table 2\ the most prominent one with feminines in
nom.-acc. plur. -ar becoming masculines in nom. plur. -ar, acc. -a.
(3) Original neuter plural place names (2.3): four categories are distinguished in
table 3, the largest one containing original neuters with zero ending (-0) in
nom.-acc. plur. becoming masculines with nom. plur. -ar, acc. -a.
(4) Plural place names based on u-stem nouns (2.4): a small body of data where
original masculines in nom. plur. -ir, acc. -u (or younger acc. -i) become fem-
inines in nom.-acc. plur. -ur.
(5) The development of the gen. plur. ending -na (2.5): in place names, the gen.
plur. ending -na shows a tendency to spread beyond its original domain in
weak feminine and neuter nouns. On the one hand, the gen. plur. ending -na
spreads to words of other inflectional classes, especially in compounds, as
shown in (17-19), or, less frequently, in non-compounds, exemplified in (20).
On the other hand, the -n- of this gen. plur. ending can be shown to have pen-
etrated other case forms of the plural paradigm, as shown in (21).
These changes fall into two main categories, as described in 2.6: on the one hand
those that involve gender switch (changes in categories 1 through 4) and, on the other
hand, the spread of the gen. plur. ending -na (category 5). The earliest of these
changes (category 1) is in evidence already at the end of the fourteenth century.
At least two characteristics of place names separate them írom ordinary nouns, as
discussed in section 3: First, Icelandic place names are primarily used in the dative
case, whereas the nominative is the most prominent case form of ordinary nouns. This
is shown by statistics for Modem Icelandic in table 4, and a study by Jóhanna Barð-
dal (2001) indicates that the situation was not significantly different in Old Icelandic.
This is discussed in section 3.1. Second, Icelandic place names frequently lack clear
marking for gender: place names are rarely used with adjectives or a suffixed article
that could reveal the gender (although there are exceptions). Moreover, the attributive
adjectives most commonly used with place names (Ytri-, Innri-, etc.) could be either
masculine, feminine or neuter. This is the topic of section 3.2. The effect of these two