Gripla - 20.12.2004, Page 152

GRIPLA150
associated in one way or another to Northern Iceland, suggesting that flykja may have
arisen as a dialectal feature of Northern Icelandic.
Section 3 describes three aspects of the development of flykkja. First, the root
vowel y shows signs of derounding to i early in the thirteenth century. This is not part
of the general derounding of y, ‡, ey which took place mainly in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, but rather a separate derounding triggered by the following
palatalized stop (§3.1). Secondly, according to the standard handbooks the develop-
ment from kk to k in flykkja is a sound change triggered by the weak sentence stress of
the verb. This explanation fails to carry conviction, since a shortening of this type
appears to be unparalleled (§3.2). Thirdly, already at an early stage flykkja often has
the 3rd sing. pres. ind. ending -i instead of the expected -ir, especially before the pro-
nouns mér and flér. The ending -i may have arisen by assimilation of -ir to the pronoun
mér (§3.3).
Section 4 briefly describes the prehistory of flykkja, which originates in a small
class of weak ija-verbs whose preterite was made by suffixation of the dental preterite
morpheme directly to the root without a union vowel. This caused phonological de-
velopment in the preterite stem that produced complex morphophonemic alternations
between the present and preterite stems (§§4.1–4.2). The East and West Germanic
attestations of this class of verbs are described in §4.3, and the phonological de-
velopment in North Germanic is outlined in §4.4.
Due to this development, the resulting verbs flykkja, flekkja ‘recognize’, sÕkja
‘seek’, and yrkja ‘work; compose’ exhibited more complex morphophonemic alterna-
tions than most Old Icelandic ija-verbs, as discussed in §5. This was especially true of
flykkja, flekkja, and sÕkja which showed two different patterns, labelled A and B:
(A) Present stem flykkj- and flekkj- vs. preterite stem flótt- and flátt-, respectively,
with threefold alternation: (i) -kkj- : -kj-, (ii) root vowels of different quality, and (iii)
root vowels of different quantity.
(B) Present stem sÕkj- vs. preterite stem sótt- with twofold alternation: (i) -kkj- :
-kj- and (ii) root vowels of different quality.
This morphophonemic alternation was more complex than in other ija-verbs and
therefore subject to simplification. This simplification could be carried out in two
ways: (i) by generalizing the present stem into the preterite or, (ii) by simplifying the
complex morphophonemic alternation. The first route was taken by flekkja and the
prefixed samflykkja ‘agree’; the simplex flykkja and sÕkja went the other way, as dis-
cussed in §6.1.
The first step in this simplification process was the replacement of kk by k in the
present stem flykkja, under the influence of sÕkja, resulting in a new pattern, labelled
B1, where there still was threefold alternation: (i) -kj- : -tt-, (ii) root vowels of different
quality, and (iii) root vowels of different quantity. In the sixteenth century, when vowel
quality no longer was phonemically contrastive in Icelandic, but rather determined by
the phonological environment, the two patterns B and B1 merged. Following this
merger, flykja with non-geminate k and sÕkja had the same pattern, whereas flykkja
with the geminate kk was isolated with the pattern A. Thus the disappearance of flykkja
with geminate kk goes hand in hand with the abolishment of the quantity correlation in
the vowel system.
Section 6.2 discusses changes affecting the preterite indicative and preterite sub-
junctive of sÕkja and flykkja. These changes involved generalizing the k of the present