Re: Old Icelandic orthography & phonology

> /e/ and /i/--yes, Gordon (9) mentions forms like <skipeno> for <skipinu>.
> By the way, what does the First Grammatical Treatise show for such vowels?

It has /e/ and /o/, if memory serves.

> By the way, Gordon is good but very "compressed." What other words are
> there in Old Icelandic like /foeti/?

Like fótr-foeti in what way exactly?

> I understand that for a-stem dat. sg. /degi/ the change is due to the
> palatal consonant +/i/ (Gordon 38). What other nouns could be given as
> examples of this change?

None. At least none that I know of. And yes, it's a bit forced to make
up a rule for something that can only be seen in one word :)

On the other hand there are some examples in the verbs.
Compare these:

fara - fór - fórum - farinn (go)
taka - tók - tókum - tekinn (take)

The 'k' seems to be the reason we have an 'e' in the participle of the
second verb but not the first.

> Yes, for 9 and 10 it is nió and tió, with accented vowels. Maybe this
> is a combination of liguistic archaeology and misprints.

I wonder. I don't remember seeing these forms anywhere else.
Writing it like that suggests that these words are mono-syllabic
which I don't think has ever been the case.

> Lass's book is available on Amazon, and I bought my copy in the local
> bookstore. It is interesting and useful for the linguistically-minded
> non-specialist. As I said, there are lots of misprints, some of them
> significant. With you help, I now see that many of the OIc forms are
> not misprints, but a reflection of a different approach. Still, I think
> it would be better to give "classical" OIc forms in a book like this.
> The forms I was questioning seem better suited to a detailed discussion
> of OIc for advanced students.

Perhaps. Then again the endings /e/ and /o/ may look more familiar to
students of other Germanic languages.

Kveðja,
Haukur