Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 111

iog
century). [1] and [u] represent, respectively, the front and
nonfront unstressed vowel, while I, E, T, 0, etc., denote the
archiphonemes representing the neutralization of the quantity
correlation in the prevocalic and prejunctural positions.
In the stage of development immediately preceding this one
we may assume that the two vowels making up each quantita-
tive pair, short and long, were of practically the same quality
and were distinguished only by a difference in length. As is
well known, the distinction of length was in early writing
marked by the superscript acute accent mark, though in the
earliest times this notation is fairly consistent in only one
manuscript, from about 1200 (The Book of Homilies). At
this time the archiphonemes were regularly identified, for
orthographic purposes, with the short vowel, that is, with
the negative term of the quantity correlation, and in writing
their quantity was therefore regularly marked in the same
negative way as that of the short vowels, viz., by leaving out
the accent mark (ibid. 34-47). At this time the two un-
stressed vowels, [1] and [u], whose quantity was nondistinc-
tive, were regularly identified with the stressed short phonemes
« and 0; in the earliest orthography they are regularly spelled
with the same letters as these, viz., ‘e’ and ‘o’, and the other
evidence there is (metrics and grammatical literature) con-
firms this identification (H. Benediktsson 1962:11-13).
Somewhat later, viz., in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
century, the mutual equilibrium of the short and long sub-
systems was gradually disturbed. As a consequence of the
lack of congruity between these two subsystems—which, in
turn, resulted from the varying identity and different chro-
nology of the successive vowel mergers which occurred in
each subsystem—a differentiation in vowel timbre took place
between corresponding short and long vowels. Thus, for in-
stance, in consequence of the merger of short e and g, each
of the remaining short front unrounded vowels obtained a
broader range of phonetic actualization than each of the cor-
responding long vowels. The short vowels may therefore be