Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Síða 140
i38
analogy is a necessary explanation, but rather whether it is
sufficient. For Norwegian, this would involve, íirst of all, the
period of about a hundred years of East Norwegian writing
preceding the second half of the thirteenth century (when the
earliest clear cases of analogy are found). Here, there are two
circumstances which render analogy manifestly insufficient
as the sole explanation (H. Benediktsson 1963:413-415):
(a) In East Norwegian manuscripts from this period the
denoting of g by ‘a’ is limited to forms with u in the second
syllable (where this notation is very regular), while g is other-
wise denoted by ‘o’ or by some other symbol not used for a
(i.e., we find, e.g., sing. land, plur. lond, but dat. plur. landum;
sing. sok, gen. sing. sakar, but dat. plur. sakum); (b) the
denoting of g by ‘a’ before an u of the second syllable occurs,
with equal regularity, in paradigms (such as hgfuð ‘head’,
gr ‘arrow’) which have no form with a upon which an ana-
logical simplification could be based (i.e., we find nom.-acc.
sing. hafuð, dat. hofði; nom.sing. or, dat. aru). The number of
the examples and their nature—the clear phonological condi-
tioning of the substitution af a for g—obviously preclude
analogy as the decisive factor. For East Nordic a correspond-
ing period of development appears two or three centuries
earlier (ibid. 426-427).
(3) My analysis of the development of the Icelandic vowel
system, a sketch of which is presented in §4.4, may indeed,
as implied by Einar Haugen, be of more interest through the
general problems and questions that it raises than as a solu-
tion to a specific diachronic problem. It is true, of course,
that saying that a historical process, as a series of individual
changes, is coherent implies, and was intended to imply,
‘that there is a connection between its individual members.’
It may further be said that this implies ‘a kind of causality,’
which we may call internal causality, though I would rather
avoid the word causality in this context. But I cannot see that
this in any way implies, or justifies, an appeal to an ‘uncon-
scious intention on the part of the speakers.’ This can hardly