On a Northern Icelandic Bad Habit and the Letter Name Je

Abstract

A letter written in 1651 by Brynjólfur Sveinsson (1605–1675), Bishop of Skálholt, to the Danish scholar Ole Worm (1588–1654) on the occasion of the publishing in that year of the second edition of Worm’s book on runes, contains comments about words like fé, mér and sér, which in Worm’s book were spelled, incorrectly in Brynjólfur’s view, as “fie”, “mier” and “sier”. The words fé, mér and sér had a long monophthong é [eː] in Old Icelandic (OIcel.), which in later Icelandic had developed to the sequence je [jɛ(ː)]. The Bishop’s comments, as well as evidence from manuscript orthography, indicate that this change had run its course long before the seventeenth century.       Brynjólfur points out that in old manuscripts, the words in question are written “fe”, “mer” and “ser”, and he claims that this is the correct way to write and pronounce such words. Furthermore, he argues that the contemporary pronunciation of je in such words is a recent bad habit, characterizing inhabitants of the North in particular, who even pronounce the name of the letter “e” as je. It is shown that the letter name je for “e” is a regular development from the OIcel. name é and is mentioned in other slightly younger sources connected to Northern Iceland.       Against prior claims to the contrary, it is argued here that Brynjólfur’s comments are not evidence that the development of é to je had still not reached all parts of the country in the seventeenth century. Such claims are contradicted by the Bishop’s own words as well as evidence from manuscript orthography. Old manuscripts probably provided Brynjólfur with sufficient evidence from which to draw the conclusion that the sequence je of words like fé, mér and sér constituted a change from older pronunciation. The Bishop pointed out that old manuscripts did not have “that illegitimate northern i” (“spurio hoc i Boreali”) and concluded that in earlier times people most likely did not pronounce the corresponding sound j either.       Because words with OIcel. long é were generally written with “e” in old manuscripts and words with OIcel. short e were usually written in the same manner, Brynjólfur probably believed that both groups of words had had the same vowel in earlier times. Furthermore, the second member of the later Icelandic sequence je, commonly derived from OIcel. é, is the same vowel as later Icelandic has in words like ber, sel and fer, going back to OIcel. short e. From Brynjólfur’s point of view, then, it seemed that words like fé, mér and sér had become differentiated from words like ber, fer and sel through the insertion of “i” (and the corresponding sound j) into the former group of words. This constituted the “bad habit” (“consvetudo vitiosa/prava”) originating with Northern Icelanders.