The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.1961, Síða 23

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
21
A Few Remarks On Some Of The
Philological Aspects Of Icelandic
by PROFESSOR HARALDUR BESSASON
Icelandic is the only modern Euro-
pean language which has faithfully
preserved many of the characteristics
of the Primitive Germanic Language
which was spoken in the greater part
of Northern Europe thousands of years
ago. As a consequence the Icelandic
language is of great interest to phil-
ologists and etymologists. Icelandic or
Old Norse has never received ap-
preciable admixture. It is because of
the purity of the language that it is
relatively easy to detect the linguistic
or grammatical laws which to a large
extent have regulated its evolution. By
analysing a few of these laws it can be
made clear in the first place that Ice-
landic grammar is an interesting sub-
ject in itself and in the second place
that it does provide the student with
a firm foundation and an experience
of almost unlimited application in the
wide realm of language studies.
A student of Icelandic will soon dis-
cover that vowel changes played an
important part in the development of
Old Norse or Old Icelandic. The same
can be said about consonant changes,
even though they are often less con-
spicuous. A number of these changes
took place 'before the settlement of
Iceland. It is nevertheless possible for
the philologist or the language student
to learn a great deal about the origin
and the development of Old Norse or
Primitive Norse by studying Old Ice-
landic alone.
MUTATIONS and FRACTURES
I shall now discuss two of the more
important evolutionary forces in Old
Norse and Old Icelandic, i.e. mutations
and fractures (some philologists prefer
the terms umlaut and breaking).
Mutations were spontaneous vowel
changes which tended to facilitate the
pronunciation of the language. It
might be more understandable to
refer to these changes as a “comprom-
ise” arrived at by two different vowels
within the same word where the suc-
ceeding vowel always caused the
change by affecting its preceding
neighbor and imposing on it a new
sound-value. A good example of this
is the verb beygja, the Primitive Norse
form of which was baugjan. In this case
the vocalic j has influenced the diph-
thong au and transformed it into ey
with the result that the verb could be
more easily pronounced.
By means of mutations an almost un-
limited number of words, denoting
new ideas or new objects, could be de-
rived from the same stem or the same
root. Hence the linguistic purity men-
tioned above.
Mutations took place in all languages
of Germanic origin except Gothic.
The greatest variety, however, is found
in Old Icelandic or Old Norse, which,
again, is one of the reasons why know-
ledge of the structure and the develop-
ment of Old Norse and Old Icelandic
is indispensible for the comparative
philologist. To explain this matter
further a few examples of mutations