Re: Icelandic umlauts.
| From: | Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, June 18, 2000, 6:12 |
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Mangiat wrote:
>Hi Oskar, and hi to all the newbies on the list (yes, I'm delurking, the
>school's at last over!). Welcome to you all from an Italian 16 yrs old
>conlanger. In these days I was taking a
>look at the declension and conjugation patterns of Icelandic, but I can't
>figure out how the umlaut system works. Every paradigm has a different
>vowel
>shift! I found an online resume of Mimir Grammar, but they don't explain
>how
>does the umlauts affects the stems. If you could help me, I'd be very
>grateful. Thank you very much!
Umlaut is a reoccuring thing in all major aspects of Icelandic grammar. They
mainly appear as grammatical mechanisms in the following:
1. Verb conjugation - the most complex part
2. Noun declension - rather minimal, but prone to irregularities
3. Word derivation - the fun part :)
There are also freely variational forms (such as [i:D@4] and [aiD@4]
'either') with 'umlaut' vs 'no umlaut', e.g. "nógan pening" vs "nægan
pening".
First, the list of umlauts:
u-umlaut:
a > ö
i-umlaut:
a > e
o > y
u > y
ú > ý
á > æ
ó > æ
vo > væ (was vá > væ, part of á > æ)
jó > ý
jú > ý
au > ey
(I may be forgetting one or two...)
The umlauts are grouped by the different "ending vowels" (for grammatical
endings) which create them. Icel. has three unstressed ending vowels, 'a'
[a], 'i' [I], and 'u' [2] (French 'deux', Swedish 'hus'). The "basic",
"neutral" vowel in this group could be said to be 'a', while the others
effect the umlauts listed above. As you can see, 'u' only affects 'a', cf.
'kaka' (nom. 'cake') > 'köku' (acc/dat/gen 'cake').
Then, umlauts on verb conjugations:
The confusing thing here is that the strong verbs both have different stems
going on for present, past singular, past plural, and past participle
(though many of those use the same stems, each verb having about three
different forms). The relationship between those stems is *not* umlaut, but
rather a different kind of sound change called "sound shift" (my
translation). I recently helped a student of Icelandic study verbs, but
first had to untangle a huge that had been created by not separating those
two things properly. She tried to apply the umlaut relationships on the
different verbal stems, which didn't work, and then concluded that the
umlaut rules were just fickle and unusable.
The different verbal stems correspond to the different forms of strong verbs
in English, 'steal - stole - stolen', 'give - gave - given'. Similar
formulas in Icelandic give 'stela - stal - stálum - stolid' and 'gefa - gaf
- gáfum - gefid'.
The i-umlaut is applied to the following parts of the conjugation:
* present indicative singular
* past subjunctive
* some past participles, a > e only (if they end in -id)
(the conjugation is a schema of indicative, subjunctive, and participle
modes crossed with past and present tenses)
The u-umlaut is applied when there's an 'u' ending, mainly past tense and 1.
p. plural. It must be cautioned, however, that the 'ur' ending common in
singular present indicative does _not_ take u-umlaut, in spite of the 'u'.
This is, AFAIK, because the 'u' there is a phonological development from
after the time of umlauts (which are ancient, being present in all Germanic
languages).
Umlauts in noun declension is, IMO, rather uninteresting. There are too many
irregularities for me to recount here. You can only really count on there
being u-umlaut after any 'u' and 'um' endings (but not 'ur', for the same
reasons as above). Generally, the i-umlaut is not particularly active in
nouns, except in the masculine strong declension. For example, the
declension of "köttur" 'cat', with the stem "katt":
Sing Plural
nom köttur kettir
acc kött ketti
dat ketti köttum
gen kattar katta
Very enjoying for foreign students ;) ([with thick Icelandic accent] "How do
you like Iceland so far...?" ;) ;)
Ok, those who are still with me may be happy to know that they're through
the boring part and have come to what is, IMO, the fun part; umlauts in word
derivation.
The rule here is basically that i-umlaut is always applied to mark a derived
word. This mechanism makes derived words very recognizable, allowing for the
huge amount of short, compact, neo-derivatives in Modern Icelandic. When
nouns are derived from verbs, they must usually use the "3rd stem", i.e.
that of the past indicative plural. Let's see some examples!:
út 'out' > ýta 'push' (derivation in this pattern usually implies
causation)
hús 'house' > hýsa 'host <someone>'
góð 'good' > gæði 'quality' (the most common adj > noun pattern; a
weak neuter noun with -i is made)
fara 'go' > ferð 'voyage'
fór 'went' > færa 'move <something>' ('fór' = 3rd stem of 'fara')
nóg 'enough' > nægja 'suffice'
mál 'language, speech' > mæla 'speak' (archaic)
svart 'black' > sverta 'blacken'
morð 'murder' > myrða 'murder'
taka 'take' > tekjur (pl) 'income, allowance'
tók 'took' > tækni 'technology' ('tók' = 3rd stem of 'taka'; 'tækni' is
a neologism designed to resemble the
international 'techno-' element; yet
it is completely logical and legal in
Icelandic)
Okay, okay...I've really written a lot here, if not too much; hope I haven't
ruined people's interest in Icelandic. And yes, I hope Mangiat is somewhat
closer to understanding Icelandic umlauts now :)
Oskar
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