Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Qupperneq 87

from different texts and describe the historical changes in its case govern-
ment.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. First, Section 2
provides a brief etymology of án. Section 3 discusses the materials and
case categorization used in this study. Section 4 compares examples from
early Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian manuscripts and discusses them
as possible Norwegianisms. Examples from Bible translations are also
analyzed. Section 5 presents examples from the post-Reformation peri-
od. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the findings of this study.

2. Variants of the preposition án
For the preposition án, Old Icelandic had the variant ón as well as án;
Cleasby and Vigfusson (1874:43, hereafter IED) state that the oldest
form in manuscripts is ón. Around 1200, scribes distinguished the long
vowel á and the long rounded vowel  (de Leeuw van Weenen 1993:52ff),
supporting the claim that Old Icelandic had a variant with the long round-
ed vowel  as well as the one with the long unrounded vowel á.
Both  and á derive from *ānu,3 the variants depending on whether the
word stress was strong or weak. When *ānu had strong stress, the vowel
ā was rounded to  through u-umlaut, giving *n. However, when it had
weak stress, rounding did not occur and ā remained unchanged (Alexander
Jóhannesson 1923–1924:101–102, Noreen 1923:75). Eventually,  changed
to ó before nasals (Alexander Jóhannesson 1923–1924:81, Noreen 1923:
105), yielding the variants án/ón. The variant ón was dominant in the ear-
liest manuscripts (IED:43), but án became frequent in later manuscripts.
In Modern Icelandic, the variant ón no longer exists.4
Case government of the Icelandic preposition án 87
3 The reconstructed form *ānu with the rounded vowel u is supported by the cognates
in other Germanic languages. According to etymological dictionaries (Alexander Jóhann -
es son 1923–1924:340, 1956:58, Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon 1989:16, Lehmann 1986:207,
de Vries 1977:9, Holthausen 1948:4, Pokorny 1959:318, Heggstad 1930:19), the preposi-
tion án is cognate with New High German ohne ‘without’, which derives from āne, ān in
Middle High German, and āno, ānu, and āna in Old High German. Old Saxon has āno
and Gothic has an ablaut variant inu. This word is cognate with Greek ἄνευ (áneu) ‘with-
out’, and also possibly Ossetian änä and Latin sine. Ultimately, án likely goes back to Proto-
Indo-European *nu ‘without’ (see Kroonen 2013:118).
4 Faroese and Norwegian Nynorsk still retain the variant with a rounded vowel.
(i) Barnið kundi ikki mammu sína ón.
child-the could not mother his/her-own without
‘The child couldnʼt do without his/her mother’ (Poulsen 1977:656)