Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Page 114

110
HREINN BENEDIKTSSON
harðmœli vs. linmæli as an example, tense and Iax occlusives are in
phonemic contrast in several positions in Icelandic, e. g. initially,
tala ‘to speak’ vs. dala ‘to dent’. But in intervocalic position, and
finally after vowels, the opposition tense vs. lax is neutralized; in all
varieties of Icelandic only one of them exists; there is nowhere a
significant contrast between forms as, e. g., [g,a:tlla] and [£a:$a],
and, therefore, using the lax occlusive for the tense one or vice versa
never implies a confusion of different forms. This is otherwise in
most of the neighbouring languages. In English, e. g., we have not
only, initially, town vs. down, but also, in positions of neutralization
from the Icelandic point of view, writing vs. riding or let vs. led. The
same applies to the standard forms of the Scandinavian languages.
In Norwegian bokmál, e. g., we find, not only tale ‘to speak’ vs. dale
‘to fall, sink’, but also, e. g., lete ‘to seek’ vs. lede ‘to lead’ or hvit
‘white’ vs. vid ‘wide’. Correspondingly, in Swedish we find tala vs.
dala, leta vs. leda, vit vs. vid.100
An observer speaking one of these languages will then tend to
ascribe too much functional importance to the fluctuation in Ice-
landic, which he will readily interpret as a confusion of significant
distinctions. It is the same phenomenon that underlies the postula-
100 In Danish, with intervocalic [d] vs. [ð], the conditions are, phonetically,
more similar to Jcelandic (with Ith — ^J] vs. [ð]), but, phonemically, they are
different, since, initially, Icelandic has three dental obstruent phonemes, t- vs.
d- vs. />-, whereas Danish has only two, f- [th] vs. <i- Td]. See R. Jakobson, C. G.
M. Fant and M. Halle, Preliminaries to Speech Analysis; the Distinctive Fea-
tures and Their Correlates (Acoustics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Technical Report No. 13; Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 5f. See,
however, also E. Fischer-Jprgensen, “What Can the New Techniques of Acoustic
Phonetics Contribute to Linguistics?” Proceedings o/ the Eighth International
Congress oj Linguists (Oslo 1958), pp. 474f. Phonemically, the Danish dental
obstruent system is comparable to the Icelandic velar system (with k- [k1'] vs.
g- 1^-] initially, hut -k- [kh — g-] vs. -g- [q] in intervocalic position), except
those varieties (see below) which, initially, have a three-way contrast, k- [kh]
vs. g- [g] vs. hv- [x(w)], but, in intervocalic position, only a two-way contrast,
as the other varieties.