Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2010, Síða 86

84 Katrín Axebdóttir
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SUMMARY
‘The enigmatic history of hvorgi, hvorugur
Keywords: pronouns, declension, historical morphology, reordering of morphemes, ana-
logy, reanalysis
The indefinite pronoun hvorugur ‘neither’ has a regular adjectival declension in Modern
Icelandic, cf. adjectives in -ugur, e.g. audugur ‘rich’. Its predecessor in Old Icelandic was
hvárgi (> hvorgi) (‘neither’, occasionally ‘any of two’), originally from the pronoun hvárr
‘each’ and the clitic -gi (-ki). At the outset the clitic naturally followed the inflectional end-
ings (see table 1). In Modern Icelandic, the remnants of the old clitic, now formally a suf-
fix, -ug-, are followed by the inflectional endings. Accordingly, the main change in the
history of hvorgi, hvorugur is an instance of a reordering of morphemes.
Hvorgi, hvorugur is a relatively rare pronoun and the development from Old Icelandic
to Modern Icelandic is difficult to follow due to the scarcity of examples. The paradigms
of engi ‘no one’ and hvergi ‘whoever’, two pronouns with a similar background as hvorgi,
are therefore considered for comparison.
At an early date the inflectional endings were in some cases phonetically reduced or
they disappeared altogether before the clitic (e.g. *hvorum-gi > hvorun-gi, *hvorr-gi >
hvorgi). The clitic -gi (-ki) was originally quite versatile, as it could be added to various
words, even nouns, but its usage had become quite restricted already by the time of earli-
est attested Icelandic. This made the situation of the clitic in the paradigm of hvorgi
somewhat precarious. Subsequently, new inflectional endings were added after the clitic.
It is argued that this started in the nom.masc.pl. where phonetic conditions were especi-
ally favourable for the change: *hvor-ir-gi > *hvor-i(r)-gi > *hvor-i-gi -* *hvor-ig-i -> hvor-ig-
ir. A new suffix, -ig-, came into existence due to reanalysis and spread to other parts of the
paradigm. In the oldest texts, from about 1200, there are already examples of the suffix in
nom.masc.pl. hvorig-ir and in gen.fem.sg. hvorig-rar, in the latter case due to analogical
levelling.
The result of this change was an overlap with the denclension of the -ig- adjectives (e.g-
auðigr). In some cases the forms were identical (e.g. gen.fem.sg. hvorigrar, cf. auðigrar). In
other cases they were not identical (e.g. nom.masc.pl. hvorigir, cf. auðgir). Contracted
forms of the adjectives before a vowel prevented this (e.g. auðigr, auðgari). Besides -ig- two