Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 138

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inf. bua ‘to live’ vs. 3rd sing. pres. býr, or imper. se vs. 3rd
sing. sér. But, of course, it is the phonological level with which
a writing system with a predominantly phonemic reference
contracts the most important relations. The utilization of
written records as linguistic evidence therefore presupposes
the analysis of these (graphemic-phonemic) relations, and as
stated in §6.1, I think the importance of these relationships
should not be underrated, especially in the early stages of
development of a writing system, when an independent,
stable, and deep-rooted writing tradition has not yet come
into existence.
On the other hand, when Einar Haugen assumes that the
scribe’s decision not to mark length in sá, nú, etc., was ‘an
expression of personal comfort, or in other words, of laziness,’
I must question the general validity or significance of the
criterion thus introduced, though individual, personal whims
in matters of writing are of course by no means excluded. In
the present case we must bear in mind, on the one hand, that
the Book of Homilies was not only ‘one of the few texts’ in
which the distinction between long and short vowels was mar-
ked; it is in fact the only such manuscript preserved from the
earliest period, with which we are concerned; and on the other
hand, we have here to deal, not with one, but with seven
different scribes, all very similar in the orthographic feature
involved (ibid. 39).
Neither should the evidence of prosody be passed over so
lightly as by assuming that the prosodic rules involved ‘could
be a carry-over from Latin’; that tenth- and eleventh-century
Icelandic skalds were so well-versed in Latin metrics is not a
very attractive assumption, nor is it likely to advance us very
far in this matter. And that the rules are, in any case, ‘artificial
and structurally distinct from the prosody of prose’ is a
highly debatable proposition. The opposite postulate seems,
a priori at least, no less fruitful, viz., that prosody is to be
regarded as a self-contained system, with an internal structure
of its own, and that, like scribal orthography, it bears certain