Old Norwegian vowel harmony

Friday May 23, 2014 at 14:15 – 16:00 (HF: 217)

Robert Paulsen (PhD researcher, Research Group for Medieval Philology)

Old Norwegian is unique among the Germanic languages in featuring a vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is a phonological process that may be described as a kind of reverse umlaut: The quality of a vowel in a following syllable is influenced by the quality of a preceding vowel. For Old Norwegian this means that the unstressed vowels /i/ and /u/ (/a/ does not participate in vowel harmony) in derivational and inflectional suffixes are partially assimilated (with regard to tongue height) to the preceding stem vowel. Thus, in manuscripts unstressed /i/ and /u/ will be represented by either <i>, <u> or by <e>, <o> – depending on the tongue height of the preceding vowel.

The situation, however, is somewhat more complicated than this: with some vowels, the vowel harmony process appears to contradict what we know about the relative tongue height of Old Norwegian vowels, raising questions about both the workings of vowel harmony in general and about our understanding of Old Norse phonology.

In my presentation, I will discuss the Old Norwegian vowel harmony – both as it is traditionally described and as I have observed it in one particular manuscript. This leading to typological questions I will compare Old Norwegian vowel harmony to similar features in languages spoken today and try to make sense out of the apparently problematic phonology behind this strikingly unique phenomenon.