Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 200

tions approach so closely in ‘no man’s land’ that certain
informants take it into their heads to declare that they are
identical. Between the East Funish area with á-+uá and the
West Funish with á~>áu there are a number of parishes with
ODan. á-+o\ Thus we have here rou‘ (ráde ‘to advise’), gou-
(Gáde ‘riddle’), nou%h (Nále ‘needles’), and the pronunciation
of these words is almost identical with that of the rou' (rode
‘to rummage’), gou' (gode ‘good’), nou'h (nodelig ‘grumpy’).
The examples chosen are bisyllabic words and here, as already
mentioned, certain informants hesitate in deciding whether
the words are identical or not. In monosyllables with the
same phonetic content, however, they do not hesitate, for
here the difference between the ö-series and the á-series is sup-
ported by a difference in the accentuation. For in the vowel
system 5 belongs to the series of high vowels together with i,
y, u, and in monosyllables with vowels from this series the
accent is a high pitch instead of a glottal stop. We have
’gou (god), 'rou (Rod), 'sou (So ‘sow’ or Sod ‘soot’), while words
from the á-series have a glottal stop, go’u (gá), ro’“ (rá ‘raw’
or Rád ‘council’), so’u (sá).
In a small, intimate language community structural con-
trasts may be based on minute phonetic differences in their
manifestation, so difficult to distinguish that people from
outside the parish only perceive them with difficulty.
South Jutlandish, like other Danish dialects, has two
structural units (we may well call them phonemes) é and œ.
Both these units, however, manifest themselves by vocoids
of approximately the same degree of opening (very near
European e), and if the attention is directed towards the degree
of opening, the manifestation of é will hardly be distinguish-
able from that of œ. But neither the dialect speaker nor the
dialectologist is in doubt, for in the speech of most informants
é appears faintly diphthongized (el), which æ does not (e').
Here, too, it is not the degree of opening of the vocoid, but
rather the direction of the articulation movement_________5//->,
which indicates the difference.