At 5:22:30 PM on Sunday, June 28, 2009, nikolai_sandbeck
wrote:

> Hello, In "A new introduction to Old Norse" there is a
> chapter named breaking. i read it carefully and looked up
> words, but i simply dont get what they mean :s

> can someone please explain it to me, thanks from Hrafn

The term 'breaking' refers to a sound change that took place
before the literary Old Norse period. When an original /e/
was followed in the next syllable by /a/ or /u/, the /e/
'broke': it became a diphthong that eventually developed
into /ja/ or /jö/. (There are some exceptions. This did
not occur after /w/, /r/, or /l/, or when the second
syllable began with /h/, and it did not occur when the
following /a/ was nasalized.)

Occasionally we have early runic inscriptions that show the
original vowel: the inscription DR BR75, for instance, has
the personal name <Heldaz>, a very early form of the name
<Hjaldr>, which is etymologically identical to the poetic
term <hjaldr> 'a fight, a battle'. The original /e/ has
become /ja/ under the influence of the (now lost) /a/ of the
second syllable. In other cases we have early compounds in
which breaking did not occur, like <erðgróinn> 'grown from
the earth': here <erð-> preserves the original vowel of
<jörð> 'earth'. The <erð-> was originally followed by a /u/
that caused the breaking seen in <jörð> and was later lost;
in the compound it was apparently lost *before* the period
in which breaking occurred.

In most cases, though, we have to use comparative evidence
from the various other older Germanic languages, especially
Old English, Old High German, and Gothic, to show what the
earlier situation was.


As far as learning Old Norse is concerned, you don't have to
worry about the historical details: you just have to worry
about the words that have broken vowels in some grammatical
forms but not in others. At the moment I can think of two
main groups. The first is a group of masculine nouns like
<skjöldr> 'shield', that have <jö> in the nominative
singular. These nouns show u-breaking in the nominative and
accusative singular and the dative and accusative plural,
a-breaking in the genitive (singular and plural), and an
unbroken vowel in the dative singular and nominative plural:

Singular Plural
-------- ------
Nom. skjöldr skildir
Gen. skjaldar skjalda
Dat. skildi skjöldum
Acc. skjöld skjöldu

U-breaking (to <jö>): skjöldr, skjöld, skjöldum, skjöldu.
(In these cases the inflectional ending used to have a
/u/.)

A-breaking (to <ja>): skjaldar, skjalda. (In these cases
the inflectional ending used to have an /a/.)

Unbroken: skildi, skildir. (The first vowel was
originally /e/; it was raised to /i/ under the influence
of the /i/ in the case endings <-i> and <-ir>.)

The other group consists of strong verbs like <gjalda> 'to
repay', with unbroken <e> in the singular present indicative
and broken <ja> or <jö> in the plural present indicative and
the present subjunctive:

PRESENT

Indicative Subjunctive
---------- -----------
ek geld ek gjalda
þú geldr þú gjaldir
hann geldr hann gjaldi
vér gjöldum vér gjaldim
þér gjaldið þér gjaldið
þeir gjalda þeir gjaldi

PAST

Indicative Subjunctive
---------- -----------
ek galt ek gylda
þú galzt þú gyldi
hann galt hann gyldi
vér guldum vér gyldim
þér gulduð þér gyldið
þeir guldu þeir gyldi

(The past subjunctive, as usual, has the front mutation of
the vowel found in the plural past indicative, here <y> from
<u>.)

Brian