Re: Icelandic umlauts.

>From: Danny Wier <dawier@...>
>Subject: Re: Icelandic umlauts.
>Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:57:27 CDT
>If I'm not mistaken, Is. a = [a], a' = [au)], ae = [ai)], u = [U] or [u-]
>(u-bar, as in Swedish), u' = [u:], y = [I], y' = [i:], and o" = [o/]
>(o-slash)?
u = [u-]
o" = [o"]
   (I think that's in the IPA; anyway, [o/] is mid-between 'u' and 'o"'.
    There was a wide-spread phonetic development going on in Iceland
    until the early twentieth century, when prescriptive-minded
    linguists convinced the government to eliminate it, where [u-] and
    [o"] merged into [o/], and [I] and [E] merged into [e])

i and i' are exactly like y and y', respectively.
u' is just [u], not inherently long. All vowels (and diphthongs) are long if
preceding a single consonant, short otherwise.

Regarding the (evil) prescriptive linguists mentioned above, their dogma
persists still here in Iceland. The merging development I described is
called "fla'maeli", a rather deragotary term (something like "flaw-speech").
In school today, people are, from the day they start, taught about the
beauty and sacredness of the Icelandic language, and the merit of careful
pronunciation and grammar. The "flaw-speech" is strongly implied as "a
temporary degradation of speech among uneducated farmers in the east of the
country, fortunately discontinued by lingua-reformers in the early 1900's".
It wasn't until my high-school Icelandic teacher told me that it had been
wide-spread and centuries old that I started to seriously rethink what I had
been taught about my native language at school. Propaganda and
brain-washing, most of it, I'd say. Do others here have experience with
pre-scriptivism in modern schools? How do you feel about it?

Oskar
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