--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Diego Ferioli <diego.ferioli@...>
wrote:

>
>
> Hi Gaël,
>
> in the dative singular there is no breaking (and so no "cluster

/ji/") only i-umlaut, as you rightly guessed. The original root vowel
*e (*skelduz or *skelduR) was fronted to /i/ because of the dat.sing.
ending -i (skildi).

That's right. Likewise in the nominative plural: *skeldjuz >
*skildijuz > ON skildir. This is thought to have been a very early
change, shared by other Germanic languages.

> Concerning breaking: this is a case of u-breaking, where *e > /jö/

(I write ö instead of the "o with the hook"). It is possible that *e
turned first into *ea (this is the kind of breaking that you find in
Old English: the same word in OE is "sceald"). But this is u-umlaut,
i.e. *e > /jö/ (because of influx of an unstressed /u/), whereas
a-umlaut is *e > /ja/ (no /u/ but /a/). Some linguists argue that
there is no u-breaking though, but only a-breaking, and that the
resulting diphtong /ja/ was later turned into /jö/ by u-umlaut. This
makes slightly more sense to me, but u-breaking remains the
traditional and most widely accepted explanation.

Good explanation. I don't really have anything to add to that. The
topic is covered briefly in E.V. Gordon: An Introduction to Old Norse.
Adolf Noreen's Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik offers a
more in-depth treatment of the phonology and morphology of Old Norse [
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_noreen_about.html ].