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SUMMARY
This paper discusses the evidence provided by sources for the historical development
of the Icelandic language. Section 2 briefly outlines four principal categories of lin-
guistic sources available to the modem investigator. Of these, the orthography of
medieval manuscripts is the most abundant and most accessible. Section 3 offers a
brief overview of the phonological development of Icelandic from the twelfth century
down to the eighteenth century, as witnessed by the orthography. It becomes apparent
that in the fourteenth century there is a clear increase in the appearance of new sound
changes. This, of course, calls for an explanation. What happened in the fourteenth
century? Four possibilities are entertained in section 4, and it is suggested that the
answer may be found partly within the sources themselves: the preserved texts and
their varying ability to reflect the language at the time of their writing.
For the purpose of linguistic inquiry, the written documents handed down to us
from medieval times come with limitations of at least two kinds, as discussed in sec-
tion 5. On the one hand, there is a textual limitation in that a vast majority of the mate-
rial committed to writing in this early period is of a highly formal nature, such as ser-
mons, laws, or other leamed texts. On the other hand there is a social limitation, since
writing was largely conftned to men (only very rarely women, it seems) of higher edu-
cation. Language change typically appears as a deviation from a standard, and thus it
tends to meet some resistance in the more formal kinds of writing. Consequently, lin-
guistic sources with these limitations are not likely to reveal language change until
long after it has begun, perhaps not until the change has itself become part of the stan-
dard language. A verse included in the so-called Fourth Grammatical Treatise shows
that the concept of language standard or language preservation was known in Iceland
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Tuming to the sources themselves, in section 6, we see that the manuscripts pre-