Studia Islandica - 01.06.1964, Page 203

Summary
From 1941 to 1944 Dr. Björn Guðfinnsson, Professor
of Modern Icelandic Language at the University of Iceland,
was engaged in a general study of the pronunciation of
present-day Icelandic. In the course of this investigations
he studied the speech of 6520 children in all parts of the
country. At the same time he studied the pronunciation of
adults, so that the total number of speakers included in this
investigation was close to ten thousand.
In 1944 Dr. Guðfinnsson set to work editing the material
thus collected, and a first volume, MáVýzkrur I, appeared in
1946. The author had intended to follow this with one or
two additional volumes, but failing health prevented him
from completing his project. At his death in 1950 he left be-
hind a great deal of material relating to his investigations.
A few years later plans were set afoot for having this ma-
terial prepared for publication, and the task was entrusted
to Ólafur M. Ólafsson, cand. mag., who had been Dr. Guð-
finnsson’s assistant and collaborator, and Óskar Ó. Hall-
dórsson, cand. mag. The present volume is the result of their
joint editorial labour.
The book is divided into ten chapters, each of which is
briefly summarized below.
1. Clusters consisting of a nasal, a lateral, or the fricative
[ð], followed by a voiceless stop are pronunced in two dif-
ferent ways in present-day Icelandic. In what is popularly
known as the voiced pronunciation the first element is