Skrifandi bændur og íslensk málsaga

Vangaveltur um málþróun og málheimildir

Abstract

This paper discusses the evidence provided by sources for the historical development of the Icelandic language. Section 2 briefly outlines four principal categories of linguistic sources available to the modern investigator. Of these, the orthography of medieval manuscripts is the most abundant and most accessible. Section 3 offers a brief overview of the phonological development of Icelandic from the twelfth century down to the eighteenth century, as witnessed by the orthography. It becomes apparent that in the fourteenth century there is a clear increase in the appearance of new sound changes. This, of course, calls for an explanation. What happened in the fourteenth century? Four possibilities are entertained in section 4, and it is suggested that the answer may be found partly within the sources themselves: the preserved texts and their varying ability to reflect the language at the time of their writing. For the purpose of linguistic inquiry, the written documents handed down to us from medieval times come with limitations of at least two kinds, as discussed in section 5. On the one hand, fhere is a textual limitation in that a vast majority of the material committed to writing in this early period is of a highly formal nature, such as sermons, laws, or other learned texts. On the other hand there is a social limitation, since writing was largely confined to men (only very rarely women, it seems) of higher education. Language change typically appears as a deviation from a standard, and thus it tends to meet some resistance in the more formal kinds of writing. Consequently, linguistic sources with these limitations are not likely to reveal language change until long after it has begun, perhaps not until the change has itself become part of the standard language. A verse included in the so-called Fourth Grammatical Treatise shows that the concept of language standard or language preservation was known in Iceland in fhe thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Turning to the sources themselves, in section 6, we see that the manuscripts pre-served from the earliest period of writing in Iceland, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, are predominantly learned writings. Most of these texts are of clerical provenance, such as homilies, lives of saints or lives of the apostles, but there is also legal and historical material. The fourteenth century, by contrast, brought not only a flourishing manuscript production, where the sheer number of preserved manuscript pages rises significantly from previous centuries, but also a clear change in the composition of the corpus of texts. From this period there are, in addition to the earlier categories, a growing number of manuscripts containing the sagas of Icelanders, contemporary sagas, as well the fornaldarsQgw and sagas of chivalry—texts that are not likely to require as strict adherence to the language standard as the more formal types of literature that earlier dominated the corpus. This suggests that the linguistic sources from the fourteenth century are not affected to the same degree by the aforementioned limitations as those from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This new freedom contributes to the increase in the appearance of new sound changes in the fourteenth century sources: a larger corpus representing a greater number of scribes and a broader selection of texts is likely to reflect the language of the time more accurately. The reduced importance of the formal language allows for the emergence of language features that earlier would have been filtered out.