Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 102
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of the relationships in which this speech sound is involved;
the more closely interrelated the elements are that are being
dealt with, the more important it is not to isolate the study
of one from the others. In brief, these considerations oppose
the idea of totality to that of atomism.
3.2. One of the implications of this point of view is the
necessity to distinguish between, on the one hand, those al-
terations which we, perhaps rather inappropriately, may call
positive changes, and on the other hand, those that are nothing
but the outcome of a reorganization of phonological relation-
ships within a phoneme system or subsystem. The former we
may conceive of as phonetic changes—that is, as changes of
nondistinctive phonetic features— that subsequently acquire
phonemic significance as the result of a phonological reinter-
pretation of one kind or another. The latter may be thought
of, inversely, as reinterpretations of phonological relation-
ships—that is, as reorganizations of the relationships between
distinctive phonetic features or between distinctive and re-
dundant features—that are manifested or materialized as a
change, of one kind or another, of the phonetic properties
of the units involved.
An appropriate case in point, in Germanic, is provided by
the so-called a-umlaut (i>e, u>o) and the so-called z'-umlaut
of e>i as compared with the z'-umlaut proper. When we
examine the place of the a-umlaut in the phonological de-
velopment of Common Germanic (or rather, of Common
North and West Germanic, since it is not apparent in Gothic),
the question at once arises whether this change is to be re-
garded as an integral part of umlaut, or whether it should,
together with other changes, in particular the change e > i, in
some sense be separated from the umlauts proper and be set
up as a structural process of its own. The first alternative
represents the traditional view, which is reflected, among
other things, in the very name by which this change is de-
signated, a-umlaut. The second alternative has the following