Re: My Apologies about Mysterious sounds

Henrik Theiling wrote:

> I read a bit more and liked some of the other shifts as well.  There
> seems to be a newer notion of length that splits the Old Norse long
> and short vowels into long and short again. :-)
>
> Old Norse=ON:
>
> ON /a:/ > far. [Oa] (long) or [O] (short)
> ON /a/  > far. [Ea] (long) or [a] (short)
> ON /o:/ > far. [Ou] (long) or [9] (short)
>
> Also, |i'| (i acute) seems to be pronounced [UY]. :-)
We are dealing with three distinct phenomena here:
(1) Diphthongization of old lengths
(2) The Scandinavian quantity shift
(3) Tertiary diphthongization of the long outputs of (2).

I have described (2) several times on this list, but in
short it means that Common Scandinavian (CS) had three
distinct types of syllable quantity: short /VC/, long
/V:C/ or /VCC/ and overlong /V:CC/.  The shift meant
that all short syllables became lengthened and all
overlong syllables shortened
	VC > V:C or VC:
	V:CC > VCC
so that only two patterns /V:C/ and /VCC/ remained in
stressed syllables.  Historically southern German also went
through the analogue of this, but then shortened all
geminates, thus reintroduced /VC/ through the back door.

>
> Whether it's irregular or not, I don't know, but pronouncing
> |allar oyggjarnar| as ['9dlUn 'ODZUnUn] is at least innovative. :-)
It's actually FA orthography which is horrendously
archaizing, without being so consistently.
The */ll/ > /t_l/ change is BTW shared with
Icelandic and West Norwegian dialects.


--

/BP 8^)
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

         Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant!
                                             (Tacitus)