Þykkja og þykja

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Abstract

The Old Icelandic weak verb þykkja ‘to seem, think’ surfaces as þykja with nongeminate k in Modern Icelandic. In the the standard handbooks, this development is described as a sound change, but this paper offers a different approach, analyzing it as analogical change. Section 2, along with Table 1, describes a survey of selected texts dating from the twelfth century down to the eighteenth century. The evidence of the orthography indicates that the development from kk to k in þykkja had begun already around 1200, progressing very slowly down to the sixteenth century when forms with k become more common than forms with kk, and in the seventeenth century þykkja with kk all but disappears, leaving þykja as the standard form of the verb. It also emerges that many of the manuscripts showing the early development of þykkja to þykja have been associated in one way or another to Northern Iceland, suggesting that þykja may have arisen as a dialectal feature of Northern Icelandic. Section 3 describes three aspects of the development of þykkja. First, the root vowel y shows signs of derounding to i early in the thirteenth century. This is not part of the general derounding of y, ý, ey which took place mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but rather a separate derounding triggered by the following palatalized stop (§3.1). Secondly, according to the standard handbooks the development from kk to k in þykkja is a sound change triggered by the weak sentence stress of the verb. This explanation fails to carry conviction, since a shortening of this type appears to be unparalleled (§3.2). Thirdly, already at an early stage þykkja often has the 3rd sing. pres. ind. ending -i instead of the expected -ir, especially before the pronouns mér and þér. The ending -i may have arisen by assimilation of -ir to the pronoun mér (§3.3). Section 4 briefly describes the prehistory of þykkja, which originates in a small class of weak ija-verbs whose preterite was made by suffixation of the dental preterite morpheme directly to the root without a union vowel. This caused phonological development in the preterite stem that produced complex morphophonemic alternations between the present and preterite stems (§§4.1–4.2). The East and West Germanic attestations of this class of verbs are described in §4.3, and the phonological development in North Germanic is outlined in §4.4. Due to this development, the resulting verbs þykkja, þekkja ‘recognize’, sÕkja ‘seek’, and yrkja ‘work; compose’ exhibited more complex morphophonemic alternations than most Old Icelandic ija-verbs, as discussed in §5. This was especially true of þykkja, þekkja, and sÕkja which showed two different patterns, labelled A and B: (A) Present stem þykkj- and þekkj- vs. preterite stem þótt- and þátt-, respectively, with threefold alternation: (i) -kkj- : -kj-, (ii) root vowels of different quality, and (iii) root vowels of different quantity. (B) Present stem sÕkj- vs. preterite stem sótt- with twofold alternation: (i) -kkj- : -kj- and (ii) root vowels of different quality. This morphophonemic alternation was more complex than in other ija-verbs and therefore subject to simplification. This simplification could be carried out in two ways: (i) by generalizing the present stem into the preterite or, (ii) by simplifying the complex morphophonemic alternation. The first route was taken by þekkja and the prefixed samflykkja ‘agree’; the simplex þykkja and sÕkja went the other way, as discussed in §6.1. The first step in this simplification process was the replacement of kk by k in the present stem þykkja, under the influence of sÕkja, resulting in a new pattern, labelled B1, where there still was threefold alternation: (i) -kj- : -tt-, (ii) root vowels of different quality, and (iii) root vowels of different quantity. In the sixteenth century, when vowel quality no longer was phonemically contrastive in Icelandic, but rather determined by the phonological environment, the two patterns B and B1 merged. Following this merger, flykja with non-geminate k and sÕkja had the same pattern, whereas þykkja with the geminate kk was isolated with the pattern A. Thus the disappearance of þykkja with geminate kk goes hand in hand with the abolishment of the quantity correlation in the vowel system. Section 6.2 discusses changes affecting the preterite indicative and preterite subjunctive of sÕkja and þykkja. These changes involved generalizing the k of the present stem into the preterite stem, a change that can be observed early for sÕkja, but not for þykkja until after it had become þykja with non-geminate k. Finally, section 6.3 describes the fate of the remade preterite indicative and subjunctive in the modern language, where only sækti, the new preterite subjunctive of sÕkja, survived.