Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Page 108

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IIREINN BENEDIKTSSON
language, which in the mother country would be kept back by the
bounds of a tenacious tradition. Mencken writes:87
The Americans, in the main, were cut off from this [the Seventeenth
and Eighteenth Centuries movement in England to standardize the
languagej, and in consequence they went on making new words freely
and cherishing old ones that had come under the ban in England.
As the second factor in the development of Icelandic, the fact may
be mentioned that Iceland is an island, separated from the nearest
continent by a vast stretch of ocean, and, further, that, subsequent
to the original settlement, there has never been any immigration to
speak of into the country. Of course, an ocean is not necessarily an
impediment to communication or an isolating factor in language
development; on the contrary, it may be a thoroughfare, exposing
the Ianguage communities bordering upon it to almost the same
mutual influence as results from direct contact. During the first
centuries of its history, there was a lively intercourse between Iceland
and Norway, which, however, from the fourteenth century on,
gradually decreased. As a matter of fact, although the general line of
development of Icelandic has been very different from Norwegian.
there are striking parallelisms between Icelandic and, especially, the
dialects of West Norway: the same changes have in many cases taken
place on both sides of the Atlantic. This is the case, e. g., for the
differentiation of rl, ll and rn, nn to dl and dn;8S the change hv- >
kv- is also Faroese and Norwegian (except, mainly, in the South-
East); the same change took place in West Shetland, and it is to be
found in Swedish dialects in Finland and Estonia;89 the change of
tense to lax occlusives (linmœli) occurs over a large area in
87 Mencken, The American Language, p. 126.
88 H. Hamre, “Norrænt mál vestan fjalls og vestan hafs,” Skírnir CXXI
(1947), pp. 86—88. See also A. Sommerfelt, “Differensiasjonen av II til dl i
norrpnt sprák,” Festskrijt til L. L. Hammerich pá tresársdagen den 31. juli 1952
(Copenhagen 1952), pp. 219—221, with references.
89 See D. A. Seip, “Om utviklingen av hv i nordiske sprák,” Nye studier i
norsk sprákhistorie (Oslo 1954), pp. 182—191.