Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 497
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reordering of the rules, putting the tjk-deletion rule before
the fusion rule, might have taken place.
As was mentioned above, there are varieties of Swedish
where rs should be considered a source of /. There will be
little difiiculty in determining when this cluster underlies / (cf.
kuscha: kursa). The fusion of rs might in fact not be phonetically
too different from the fusion of sg.
Again some French loanwords cause problems. In a few
cases there is an alternating pronunciation / or j, e.g. genial,
generalisering, gelatin. One would like to take care of this by a
rule j-*-f (applying after the rules giving j from g before
palatal vowels). Some words would then have to be marked
to tell whether they should undergo the rules obhgatorily,
optionally, or not at all.
Conclusion
Summing up, we can make certain general observations.
The status of y, g, and / varies with the amount of data and
variation we want to cover by our rules. If we take an extreme
attitude and want to derive the spelling, too, there is clearly
no place for y, g, and / as morphophonemes. In this case we
would have to use many ad hoc rules to derive different
spellings of /, e.g., in choklad, shejk, schakt, jasmin, geni. If we
want to derive different variants—e.g., those listed in SAOL—
the situation is somewhat similar to the extreme case, though
certainly not as bad, since much of the variation in foreign
words is due to spelling pronunciation. If we want to cover
dialects, the underlying forms will look like (reconstructed)
historical forms and the rules like the sound changes in the
different varieties. Eliminating y, g, and / as morphophonemes
there will be several cases where we can choose between
different underlying forms, and our choice will often be
different from the one shown in the spelling. The standard
source for y will be ng (except before n); for g it will be kj or
tj; and for / it will be sj. Notice that the names for y, g, and /
in Swedish are ng-ljud, tj-ljud, and sj-ljud (cf. Sigurd 1969).