Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1960, Side 51

UM TVENNS KONAR FRAMBURÐ Á LD
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lcelandic poetry from about 1350 until the eighteenth century, as well as the
orthography of various works from this period, and has come to the following
conclusions:
In poetry from 1350—1550 (religious poetry and rímur) this distinction is
maintained in rhyme (i. e. later Id and earlier lld do not appear in rhyming
pairs) with very few exceptions (see table in § 2.0). Some of the exceptions
admit of special explanations; others occur in poems replete with slipshod
rhyme. Four examples seem to break the rule altogether (three of which are
preterite forms of the verb þola).
The orthographic distinction between Id and lld is generally maintained until
about 1650 all over the country. From then onwards some confusion can be
Iraced in the South and the East, but this distinction seems to be maintained in
the North and the West until about 1700.
The evidence of rhyme leads to the same conclusion. The latest poets who
distinguish two types of Id in their rhyme come from the North, bom about
1657 and 1667, but in the South there seems to be some uncertainty in the mind
°f a poet born in 1635, and the East-Icelander Bjarni Gissurarson (c. 1621—
1712) confuses these two consonant groups, at least in poems written in his
later years. In the North, on the other hand, this kind of confusion first occurs
m poetry by poets born in 1670 and 1672. The old distinction between two types
of Id seems therefore to have disappeared in the South and the East after the
middle of the seventeenth century, but, in the North and the West, it seems to
have been maintained towards the end of this century.
Two examples of the possibility of using these conclusions for dating poetry
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are mentioned.
The phonetic difference between later and earlier Id (Id and lld) must have
Iteen distinctly perceptible, since these two sounds were kept apart in rhyme.
Earlier scholars generally considered the l in the later group Id to have been
cacuminal, or fartlier back al least than in the earlier Id. Evidence for the exist-
cnce of cacuminal / in later Icel. is insufficient, and the theory of its existence
m Old Icel. has never been proved. It is only based on the presence of this sound
tn Norwegian and Swedish dialects.
What chiefly could indicate the nature of this phoneme in rhyme are numer-
°us examples of words like fylgd, fylgdi rhyming with words containing the
later Id; there is one example of the spelling Fjfllgde (= fjöldi), which mighl
be a „reversed spelling". In Modern Icelandic pronunciation the g in the con-
sonant group Igd is, as a rule, greatly weakened or entirely lost, the l becoming
more or less velarized. It is suggested that the / in the later Id was velarized,
perhaps similar to the / in English field.
The later Id had a very precarious position in the phoneme system: it occur-
fed only in the inflected forms of eleven /a-verbs with a stem in / and in a few
ÍSLENZK TUNGA 4