Some Aspects of Nordic Umlaut and Breaking

1.1. The Scandinavian, or Nordic, languages, generally considered to be a separate, independent branch of the Germanic language family, and therefore to be the modern representatives of a single relatively uniform or homogeneous common ancestor-Proto-Scandinavian or Proto-Nordic-have, during the past millennium or so, developed rather differently. This has led to an ever increasing differentiation and diversity, the result being that, even if these languages are still, to a greater or lesser extent, mutually intelligible, they now differ from each other on a number of points, some of fundamental structural significance, some of more limited consequence. Although most of the characteristics by which these languages are distinguished at present are of comparatively late origin-from the last six to eight centuries-it is commonly assumed that considerable dialect differentiation of the Nordic-speaking area was present much earlier. For a long time, one of the earliest dialect differences in the Nordic area was considered to have arisen in connection with the development of the so-called u-umlaut. In contrast to the i-umlaut-the fronting of all nonfront vowels before an unstressed syllable with i or j-u-umlaut consisted in the rounding of all nonround vowels , i.e. i, e, e (created by i-umlaut), and a, before a syllable with u or w. The subsequent reduction and/or loss of unstressed vowels resulted in the phonemicization of the front allophones created by i-umlaut (y, 0, e), and later of the round allophones produced by u-umlaut, which either merged with the new phonemes created by i-umlaut (y < i, 0 < e, ?) or became independent phonemes (( < a).' The last change, however, presents certain complications. 1.2. Before an u that was subsequently lost, as well as before w lost or preserved, a was rounded; in the earliest Nordic writing, the resulting vowel is consistently written differently from a, viz. by the symbols 'o, ao', etc., including 'Q, which is the symbol used in the First Grammatical Treatise, in normalized Old Icelandic orthography, and in Nordic linguistics. Thus we find acc. sg. OIcel. Qrn, OSw. orn < PN *arnu, inf. OIcel. hQggua, OSw. hogga < *haggwan, with umlaut throughout the whole Nordic area. Before an u that was retained, on the other hand, we find 'o, Q, ao', etc. (e.g. in dat. pl. Qilum Iqndum) only in Icelandic manuscripts and those Norwegian ones which there is reason to believe are from Western Norway. But in East Norwegian manuscripts, i.e. from the East proper and from Tr0ndelag, and in Old Swedish and Danish records we find fairly consistently 'a' in this position (e.g. dat. pl. allum landum).