An Icelandic-English Dictionary/Outlines of Grammar/The Alphabet

by Guðbrandur Vigfússon and Richard Cleasby

THE ALPHABET

THE Icelandic alphabet (stafrof) in popular use as taught to children consists of the following letters (stafir):—

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u (v), x, y, z, þ, æ, ö,

the name of which may be learnt from two stanzas by Gunnar Pálsson in the Barna-gull:—

A, bé, cé, dé, e, eff, gé, eptir kemur bá, í, ká, ell, emm, enn, ó, einnig pé, ætla eg qú þar standi hjá.

Err, ess, té, ú eru þar næst, ex, ý, zeta, þorn, æ, ö— allt strafrofið er svo læst í erendin þessi lítil tvö.

The vowels are pronounced long. This alphabet was, with some additions, adopted from the Latin, and the þ was added at the end: and so late as the 17th century (in the Glossary of Magnus Ólafsson, who died 1636, and in the Icel. Grammar of Runolf Jónsson, who died 1654), the alphabet ends with þ, æ and ö being attached to a and o; Runolf calls the ö ‘o brevissimum.’ At a later time æ and ö were detached from a o, and put at the end; but not both of them at the same time, as Björn Halldórsson ends his Dictionary with æ. Gunnar Pálsson, who wrote the first popular abc, seems to be the man who, by his memorial stanzas, settled the alphabet as it is now taught. The division into mutes, liquids, etc. is to well known to be repeated. either are we here concerned with the Runic alphabet; there can be little doubt that this too was rudely imitated from the Greek or Latin, perhaps from coins: Roman coins of the 2nd and 3rd centuries of our era have been dug up in Scandinavian cairns and fens: foreign coined money was centuries in advance of books, and in barbarous countries shewed the way to the art of writing.

The vowels (hljóð-stafir or less properly raddar-stafir) are,    1. simple (short)—a, e, i, o, u, y, ö.    2. diphthongal, either marked with the acute (′), á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, or double letters, au, ei, ey, æ (œ). Thus in written Icel. all the vowels together are, a á, e é, i í, o ó, u ú, y ý, æ, ö, the diphthongs au, ei, ey being included under a and e respectively. In this Dictionary the simple and acute vowels are treated under one head, but separately one after another: e.g. A in pp. 2-36, Á in pp. 36-48; these letters are widely different from one another both as to sound and etymology; a and á, o and ó, i and í, for instance, being no more akin than a and ei, o and au, etc.; and therefore great confusion would arise from mixing them together. The long vowels are chiefly due to contraction or absorption of consonants, which in Icel. has been carried farther than in any any other Teutonic language, e.g. ar, atom, and ár, year; vin, friend, and vín, wine; dyr, door, and dýr, deer; fullr, full, and fúll, foul; goð, god, and góðr, good, etc.

To the consonants (samhljóðendr) were added in olden times the ð (eð), þ (þorn); and in modern times j, about the end of the last century; so that in Icel. writing all the consonants are, b, c, d ð, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z, þ, (=twenty-one); and this brings the whole alphabet to thirty-six letters:—

a á, b, c, d ð, e é, f, g, h, i í, j, k, l, m, n, o ó, p, q, r, s, t, u ú, v, x, y ý, z, þ, æ (œ), ö,

from which number we may subtract c, q as little in use, x, z as compound letters, ö as subordinate to d, œ and æ are treated as one letter, and thirty remain; au, ei, ey go along with a and e, each in its due place, as also ja, já, jó, jö, jú.

There is a curious division of the alphabet by an old Icel. grammarian of the latter part of the 12th century (Skálda 169-173). He draws five concentric circles: in the centre he places what he calls the höfuð-stafir (‘head-staves,’ initial letters), viz. h, q, v, þ, which in Icel. can only stand at the beginning of a syllable: in the next ring the mál-stafir (‘speech-staves’ or common consonants), twelve in number, which can stand both as final and initial: in the third ring the hljóð-stafir (‘voice-staves,’ vowels, still so called in Icel.), twelve in number, among which he distinguishes between six simple and six long vowels, the latter marked as at present with ′; with them also he counts the límingar (‘clusters,’ double vowels), æ, ꜵ, ꜷ, and lausa-klofar (split letters), ei, ey, as well as ia, io, iu; the vowel i he calls skiptingr (a changeling) from its being sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant: in the fourth ring are the capitals, which in MSS. are made to serve for double consonants (e.g. kroS = kross): lastly, in the fifth ring, the undir-stafir (‘under-staves,’ sub-letters), ð, x, z, which in Icel. can only be used as final.

Thorodd (Þóroddr Gamlason, called Rúnameistari or Rune-master) is the oldest Icel. grammarian, and lived in the beginning of the 12th century; for a curious account of this remarkable man, a builder by profession, see D. i. 235. He makes thirty-six vowels, nine of which seem to be nasal, caused by the frequent dropping and agglutination of n (in the infinitives, the weak nouns, etc.) These letters were lost before writing began, but left a nasal sound so late as the beginning of the 12th century. To the five Latin vowel characteristics he adds ǫ, ę, ø, y. These nine vowels as the nasals he then doubles by marking the long with an acute (′), and so they make thirty-six. In writing and printing, ǫ, ę, ø are out of use, but occur frequently in MSS.

Icel. prose literature extends over nearly eight centuries, and in the course of that time the language lost some of its rich vowel system; besides the nasals we are able to trace seven distinct vowels as lost. Four of them were lost at a very early time, perhaps in the 12th century, viz. ǫ́ the umlaut of á (see p. 1, B. 5); ø or œ, a vowel change of ó; and the double e and ö sound (see introduction to letter E); all these four letters were lost about the same time, and so early that few MSS. use them; they are not noticed in this Dictionary, except now and then for etymological purposes. Some three or four centuries later, three other vowels vanished, viz. the y sound in all the three letters y, ý, ey, which became respectively = i, í, ei; but the former are still preserved in writing and printing. The MSS. down to the Reformation make in most cases a sharp distinction between the i and y sound, as also the poets; yet one very ancient MS. of the 12th century (Arna-Magn. 623, see Frump. pp. 42-48) is remarkable for its confounding both letters. The same confusion is observable in Anglo-Saxon; whereas in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the distinction of i and y is still strictly kept up. As for Icel. we suspect that the change began in some remote district at an early time, until many centuries later it was suddenly adopted throughout the whole country.

The Icel. is not, in its pronunciation, a strongly accented language, (the acutes, as stated above, are marks of diphthongs, not of accent,) and is in this respect nearest in sound to the French. In modulation the Icel. is in the main trochaic (– ⏑|– ⏑), and arsis and thesis follow alternately one after another: secondly, all root syllables are accentuated, but inflexive syllables have no accent, e.g. bārnă, hāndă, bōðă, hārðăn, fāgră; in bisyllabic compounds both the root syllables accentuated, but the second with only a half accent, which we mark by ⏓, e.g. sām-bā̆nd, hūg-bō̆ð, as also in strong inflexions like -andi, -astr, e.g. eīgā̆ndi, hārðă̄stăn: if one of the words which form a compound falls in the third syllable it is accentuated, e.g. bārnă-gūll, bārnă-gūllĭ, hāndă-vērk (but hānd-vē̆rk), because in this case the arsis falls on the third syllable which is a root: in trisyllabic words with bisyllabic inflexion the third syllable is sounded ⏓, e.g. laūsnărī̆nn, hūggŭnā̆r, sȳngăðī̆st, sānnleĭkā̆nn, hēntŭgā̆st, trūăr-ī̆nnar (fidei), nāðar-ī̆nnăr, hōfðĭng-jā̆nnă, and that even though the second syllable is a root syllable, e.g. ūppvā̆knā̆ðr, āfsō̆kū̆n: words like blēssŭmăr|ī̆nnăr, mīskŭnăr|ī̆nnăr, drōttnĭngăr|ī̆nnăr, etc. are dactylic. Root and inflexion on the one hand and the trochaic flow on the other are felt all along, mutually resisting or aiding one another as to the measure of a syllable; accordingly, whenever the arsis falls on ⏑ it becomes ⏓, if on ⏓ it becomes –. In the best Icel. poets half-accentuated syllables may form full rhyme, by a poetical license; thus, in the Passíu-Sálmar more than eight score, and in Búnaðar-balkr more than two score of such rhymes are found, e.g.

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