Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Blaðsíða 598

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convention. In similar fashion a word like stovel ‘boot’ will
have the phonological representation stevvel, which will
correctly allow the 0 to remain short. Words like jod ‘iodine’,
lemen ‘lemming’, kokos ‘coconut’, etc., which are pronounced
with geminated consonants, can show gemination in the
underlying phonological representation; thus, jodd, lemmen,
kokkos, etc. Other peculiar phenomena having to do with
gemination remain unaccounted for. When a loanword such
as hotell ‘hotel’ [hotéll] undergoes a stress shift in colloquial
pronunciation, there is a corresponding doubling of the conso-
nant to [hóttell]. (Such words always have tone 2 after the
stress shift.) Also to be mentioned is the word fot ‘foot’, having
the plural fotter [fottor], with a geminated consonant. Other
problems which will not be discussed in detail here are words
having a stressed syllable consisting of a short vowel plus a short
consonant, such as the words mentioned in § 1. Another
problem is the letter d in the orthography, which is not
pronounced under a variety of conditions. It would be easy
to simply eliminate this from the phonological representation,
but it appears that it must be retained in certain cases, e.g.
hard ‘hard’, which shows the neuter form hardt, with a short
vowel.
Our next task is to determine an ordering for the rules
which have been postulated. To begin with, the vowel-length
rule, (20), follows the stress rules previously discussed, since
the feature [ + stress] is required to predict vowel length
here. Devoicing, rule (22), must precede shortening, rule (23),
so as to insure the operation of (23). Velar assimilation of
n, rules (12) and (13), must follow palatalization; otherwise,
a form such as innkjop ‘purchase’ would be subject to velar
assimilation, resulting in [^ig^op]. Umlaut, rule (15), must
precede vowel shift, rule (16), so that the proper related forms
are arrived at, i.e., gjorde vs. gjore and not gjorde vs. *gjyre.
Finally, vowel shift follows velar assimilation so that tung
‘heavy’ can retain the [-back] vowel.