Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1964, Page 224

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Norse Steinn in Hebridean Place-Names
monophthongized aí with a following palatal fricative that
was lost in the process.
This presupposes that the O. N. diphthong had not yet
developed into the æi or ei found in the earliest literary
sources (second half of the twelfth century) but was still
pronounced [ai] as in Proto-Scandinavian and Common
Germanic, with a back or central a.
Accordingly, those Norse words in which the diphthong
ei became C. G. aí in the process of adaptation must have
been borrowed earlier than those which received C. G. e.
Exactly how early it is impossible to tell, but insofar as
we can infer anything from contemporary runic inscriptions,
which render the diphthong first as ai, later also as i, æi,
and ei, the change from ai to æi/ei is likely to have taken
place during the eleventh century.
If we combine these conclusions concerning the deve-
lopment of Gaelic and Norse, we must ask ourselves why
Norse ai, in the earlier stratum of loans, was rendered by
C. G. ai and not, for instance, by C. G. á< (long a fol-
lowed by palatal consonant), as it actually was at one stage
of Irish (see Marstrander, Bidrag pp. 68—9). The inevi-
table answer is that aí was phonetically more similar to
Norse ai and therefore almost certainly still a diphthong.
As we cannot expect Norse place-names to have been
adopted by the Gaels in the earliest decades of Norse
colonization, we may fairly safely conclude that C. G. aí
was a diphthong at least until the middle of the ninth
century and probably still longer: its other allophone, áe,
is rendered by runic ai in the name mailbrikti (for Gaelic
Máel Brigte) on the Kirk Michael cross in the Isle of Man
as late as the first half of the tenth century. It is, there-
fore, reasonable to suppose that the C. G. phonemic unit
áe/aí remained more or less clearly diphthongal until about
1000 A. D. The same date may tentatively be assumed to
be the turning-point in the history of Hebridean Norse
when the old diphthong ai began to develop steadily in