Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 13.07.1981, Qupperneq 223

On Some Icelandic Irregular Imperative Forms 213
seen from the fact that the inorganic t was also introduced into the imp.
sg. of a number of strong verbs, where it was of course not supported by
some t of the non-present forms. (E.g. there is the imp. sg. bregtu beside
bregðu of the strong verb bregða ‘move quickly.’) However, in the
modem language, the mn-verbs that have an inorganic t in their imp.
sg. always have it in their non-present forms also, and v. v. I assume
that this uniformity in the distribution of the inorganic t in the /an-verbs,
in as much as it is not accidental, is due to the activity of rule (1). As
the matter is totally unexplored, I leave it out of account here.
Jón Helgason’s explanation of the imp. keyptu as parallel with orktu
was tentatively questioned by Oresnik (1977:624), who drew attention
to the one-time existence of a verb keypa ‘buy’, culled by Bjöm Karel
bórólfsson (1925:119) from Jón Arason’s poetry (sixteenth century):
the imp. keyptu could be a remnant of the now obsolete keypa.
Thus there are two hypotheses concerning the origin of keyptu, one
that builds on the identity of the imp. keyptu with the 3p. pl. pret. ind.
keyptu, and the other that sees in keyptu a remnant of the verb keypa.
How can we choose between these hypotheses? My strategy has been to
look for ways in which the new imperatives such as orktu differ system-
atically from the old imperatives such as yrktu, and to try to determine
whether the imp. keyptu behaves like the imp. orktu or like the imp.
yrktu.
I have found one such systematic difference: the old imperatives such
as yrktu have short imperatives beside them (i.e. there is yrk beside
yrktu), whereas the new imperatives such as orktu are not thus coordin-
ated with short forms (i.e. there is no ork beside orktu), as shown
schematically in (3), q.v.
(3) long imperative short imperative
yrktu yrk (þú)
orktu *ork (þú)
The inherited imp. kauptu parallels the imp. yrktu: there is also kaup
(þú). The new imp. keyptu parallels the imp. orktu: there is no keyp
(þú) in the language, according to my informants (although there exists
keypt þú, a form clipped from keyptu in the way explained in Oresnik
J980a, b). Consequently, the imp. keyptu is not a present stem forma-
tion based on the verb keypa, but is to be explained as orktu.
(The imp. studdu and spurðu could be checked in the same way, and