Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 318

3í6
in the case of the nominative singular of masculine w-stems
speaks very clearly against the view that these forms ever
contained unstressed /-æ/. Incidentally, the absence of such
inverse spellings for reflexes of PIE /é/ in root syllables also
effectively eradicates Krause’s assumed intermediate stage be-
tween PIE /é/ and ON /á/.
3. In attempting to determine the phonological value of
the runes, it is of considerable importance to establish the
original fit between the runic alphabet and the linguistic
system it was intended to represent. Steblin-Kamenskij (1959
and 1962) made just such an attempt. He concluded that
although the 24-letter fuþark contained six vowel-symbols,
only five of them could ever have had graphemic status, while
the sixth, the J'-rune, was superfluous from the very inception
of runic writing. He came to this conclusion because it was
not clear to him how this rune could have lost its graphemic
status and come to be a marginal graph, as it obviously is in
the texts that have come down to us. A review of this problem,
however, has led me to a different conclusion.
On the basis of comparative evidence, we can reconstruct
for Proto-Germanic the vowel system given in Table i, con-
sisting of four short and four long phonemes with the distinc-
tive features3 given in Table 2.
If we ignore the feature of length, which was not normally
distinguished in the Mediterranean alphabets from which the
fuþark derives, it is possible to collapse columns 1 and 5, as
3From the later development of the Proto-Germanic vowel system, it is
clear that the distinctive feature in the oppositions /i/:/u/, /æ/:/ö/, etc., was
spread : rounded rather than front:eack, and that /a/ did not share in this
opposition (see Antonsen 1967:26-27).
While I list /e/ as neither high nor low (and therefore mid), recent discussion
of vowel distinctive features rejects a single binary opposition for tongue height
(see Kiparsky 1968:187 and Wang 1968:700-703). I would prefer to recognize
three distinctive heights, high : mid : low, with a redundancy rule which rewrites
[+higii] as [—low] and [+low] as [—high], but does not affect [+mid],
thereby making allowance for systems with more than three tongue heights.