Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Qupperneq 79

ICELANDIC DIALECTOLOGY: METHODS AND RESULTS
77
no less than in pronunciation, and this within much narrower areas
than one would expect a priori’.15
Probably the most extreme example is the name of ‘the godwit’.
The literary name of this bird is jaðrakan. Until recently it has been
known to exist only in the South (in Arnessýsla and Rangárvalla-
sýsla). But in this area more than half a dozen different forms—and
over a dozen if we include the variants—of this name are known,
and they have a fairly regular geographic distribution, at least in the
speech of the older generation.16
Probably, the fundamental conclusion of Jónsson’s study of the
vocabulary specific to the county of Vestur-Skajtajellssýsla—viz. that
the geographic distrihution of words tends to vary—is of general
validity; in all parts of the country, differences in vocabulary are
numerous, hut very often their boundaries do nol coincide; in other
words, extensive bundles of isoglosses are probably rare.
III
As in vocabulary, there are a few minor differences in morpho-
logy, but they have received little attention. Let me mention, e. g.,
the pret. plur. vóru and kómu, mainly in the North and the West, for
voru and komu (from vera ‘to be’ and koma ‘to come’); the fluctua-
tion in the pret. root vowel of the so-called rt-verbs, e. g. gröri, greri
or gréri from gróa ‘to grow’; the verb hanga ‘to hang’, which is some-
times weak (pret. hangdi) in the North, otherwise strong (pret.
hékk); the lst sg. pres. of öri-verbs, whieh often ends in -i in the
,s Ibid., p. 148:
___að' mállýzkur cru til hér á landi í orðaforða manna ekki síður en í
framburði og það á miklu þrengra svœði en ætla mætti að órannsökuðu
máli.
16 Data collected by Helgi Guðmundsson, to be published in a forthcoming
article.—The forms differ in gender and in the phonemic structure of their
latter half (masc. jaðraki, and, rarely, jaðreki, jaðriki; fem. jaðraka, jaðrelca,
jaðrika, jaðrikja, jaðríkja, and, rarely, jaðrikka). The variation consists in the
insertion, by popular etymology, of r into Ihe first part, which thus becomes
homophonous with jarð- ‘earth’.