Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Withdrawal

I withdraw the following statement made in an earlier post:

Note though that due to the fact that we orthographically
respect syncopation in words with acute accent, we don't
need the shorthand hyphen in a word like hestn [hɛstn̩]
(acute accent) 'the horse', from ON acc. hest·inn, i.e.,
hest + inn. (Modern Jamtlandic indefinite form hest
[hɛst] 'horse'.)

I realized today that the definite form of mat [
mɑːt] 'food' is pronounced [mɑːtn̩], i.e., with a syncopation. According to the rule claimed above one would then spell "matn". Now, this will interfer with e.g. vatn [ʋatːn̩] 'water' (Old Norse vatn [wɑtn]). A solution could be to spell "vattn", but this will not be consistent with other aspects of my orthography. The simplest solution is to withdraw the rule stated above. That is, we will write hest·n [hɛstn̩].

To conclude, we write hest·n [hɛstn̩]
'the horse', mat·n [mɑːtn̩] 'the horse' etc.,
not "hestn", "matn" etc.

Note that this doesn't affect spellings like knéð [
kneː] 'the knee' instead of the completely redundant "kné·ð".

1 comment:

Adam Emil Skoog said...

Ugly. :( At least ‹hest'n› would be nicer (or just make ‹vatn› a slight exception; are they really that aware of their gemination?).