Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Blaðsíða 92
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IIREINN BENEDIKTSSON
About the difference [harðyr] vs. [harclyr] etc., which had been
considered recent, possibly as late as the last century, the opinion
has recently been voiced that it may be much earlier, probably as old
as the fourteenth century,42 but the evidence is not conclusive, one
way or the other.
From this it appears that the main phonetic differences at present,
from the point of view of chronology, fall into two distinct groups,
one dating back to at least the fourteenth century, whereas the other
dates only two or three centuries back, at most. The earlier innova-
tions have a much wider distribution, the original features being
preserved in limited areas only. On the one hand, monophthongs be-
fore [t]] are preserved mainly in the North-West {Vestfirðir); on
the other hand, we find monophthongs before [j], and rl, rn (with-
out [$]) only in the South-East.
A quick glance at the map of Iceland immediately shows abun-
dant geographic reasons for a widespread isolation of the communi-
ties of the North-Western peninsula. The survival here of the old
feature of monophthongs before [tj] is therefore understandable. We
shall see examples of the survival of other such features in this part.
But as regards the South-East, a glance at the map reveals no such
geographic segregation. Stefán Einarsson therefore suggested that
the present boundary of the South-East area (with monophthongs be-
fore [j], and rl, rn)—at least on the northern side—originated in the
seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, during the period of Danish
trade monopoly in Iceland (1602—1854).43 Einarsson says:44
... it early became customary that certain districts should trade with
a certain harhor or port, but this division did not become compulsory un-
til 1684, when every port was allotted a well-defined district and any
trading with outsiders was punished severely ... The district-trading, as
it was called, was strictly enforced in the period 1684—1733; after that
the rules were somewhat liberalized, but practically the trade-districts
remained the same.
42 Magnússon, “Um framburðinn rd, gd, jd,” pp. 18—25.
43 “Icelandic Dialect Studies ...,” pp. 556—559.
44 Ibid., p. 557.