Re: French spelling scheme

On Thu, 3 May 2001 13:01:08 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

>Just to add my own bits of hear-say to the story: a different umlaut
>has also occured before -u (and sometimes before the empty ending) in
>Germanic languages.  E.g., look at Icelandic `köttur', `the cat',
>whose stem is `katt-':
>
> NOM.  katt + ur  -> köttur
> ACC.  katt + 0   -> kött
> DAT.  katt + i   -> ketti
> GEN.  katt + ar  -> kattar
Though to clarify, I should note that the origin of the u-umlaut cannot be
found in Icelandic endings, or even Old Norse endings. We have to go back
to Proto-Norse; I don't have any reference at the moment, but I think the
above paradigm was something like this in PN:

nom  katt-uz
acc  katt-u~
dat  katt-i
gen  katt-az

(Reminding you of Latin?)

/z/ changed to /r/ in Old Norse, and some ending vowels were lost, so that
the ON paradigm was like this, after umlaut:

nom  kött-r
acc  kött
dat  kett-i
gen  katt-ar

Note that the umlauting u's were lost. However, an epenthetic 'u' was added
to -r endings in Icelandic, changing the nom form to "köttur"; this 'u' has
no relation to the PN 'u', and has nothing to do with the umlauts at all.
Very few Icelanders realize this... it's an annoyingly common idea that
umlauts are still phonologically active in our language.

>I especially like `double u-umlaut' in
>     NOM.SG  altari    `altar'
> ->  DAT.PL  ölturum   `to the altars'
The double u-umlaut is a weird phenomenon which I believe to have baffled
many linguists, though I'm not qualified to understand why. The thing is
that there is free variation between single- and double-umlaut, so
that "altörum" is just as common as "ölturum".

Regards,
Óskar

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