Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1999, Síða 266

IX Contracted forms
Introduction
The contraction test concems the development of hiatus, which in Old
Norse word-forms can be found only where a long vowel is followed by
a short vowel. In the course of the Old Norse period there was a tend-
ency to replace these forms by shorter forms without hiatus, with the
loss of one syllable, and the occurrence of such forms may thus reveal
something of the age of the text.1
In a somewhat simplified description, hiatuses can be said to be dealt
with in three different ways:
1) Anon-front vowel followed by a front vowel (in normalized spelling:
ui, di, åi) was left unchanged.
2) A vowel followed by a vowel of similar articulation was contracted,
i.e. the latter vowel was subject to apocope (da > å, éi > é, li > i, uu
> u, du > o, qu > q).
3) A front vowel followed by a non-front vowel was subject to accent
shift, where stress and vowel length were removed from the first
component to the second, resulting in a rising diphthong (ia > ja, iu
> ju, éa > ja, éu > jo, æa > ja, æu > jo).
1 Important discussions concerning the test can be found in Sievers 1878: 514-17; Bugge
and Sievers 1891: 394-401; Finnur Jénsson in KonråS Gislason 1892: xiv-xv; Finnur Jons-
son 1901: 26-27, 39-40, 61, 67, 69, 85-87, 94-95, 108, 111; Pipping 1903: 105-06;
Sijmons 1906: clxxiii-clxxiv; Finnur Jonsson 1921: 257-61. The best survey of the Eddie
material is still in Wilhelm Ranisch’s dissertation 1888: 74-79. Konrå5 Gfslason 1889 dis-
cusses a number of skaldic examples. A locus classicus is Snorri’s Håttatal, st. 7, where
contracted forms are characterised as seinar: “It is a licence in verse-forms to have slow or
quick syllables so that there is a drawing on or back from the normal number of the rule, and
they can be found so slow that there are five syllables in the second and fourth line”
(Faulkes 1987: 171). For a recent discussion, cf. Faulkes 1991: 50. Cf. also Kuhn 1983:70.