Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Blaðsíða 92

100
Toward the phonetic description of Faroese vowels
alphabet of the International Phonetic Association. — Finally,
various simplified (partly structural) notations have been
devised in recent years.
There certainly is a firm basis for the further study of
Faroese pronunciation. But there are many unsolved pro*
blems, not the least concerning vowel quality.
From the point of view of structural analysis, the basic
problem (in establishing the system of vowel phonemes)
is that there is no direct congruity between the systems of
long and short vowels It immediately suggests itself to
identify the vowels pairwise as bound variants of one set
of phonemes ([i:] of linur and [1] of lint representing one
phoneme /i/, and similarly for other vowels), but as the
long vowels exceed the short ones in number, the analysis
poses intricate problems. It is not so that some of the long
vowels evidently match the short ones in quality, whereas
the remaining ones are phonetically “leftovers”, and the
analysis must probably involve a compromise between rather
conflicting criteria. — In the glossematic analyses of the
system by Marie Bjerrum and Povl Skárup1) long and short
units are classified together if they alternate automatically
under inflection, derivation, or composition (as [i:] and [1]
in the example given above), and consequently, several of
the short vowels are interpreted as overlappings of two or
more otherwise distinct units. If “phonetic realism” is con<
sidered to be the important issue (cp. Otmar Werner’s
analysis of the consonant system2), some of the variation
must be considered morphophonemic, and it makes sense
to pose a structural difference between all long and short
vowels The system of long vowels resembles the English sy=
stem in that it is open to question which vowels are phonemic
diphthongs (in addition to the diphthongs written t'/ý, ey,
ei, oy, which may be found both long and short, and com<
*) Acta philologica Scandinavica 25, p. 31—78 (1962).
2) Phonetica 9, p. 79—107 (1963).