THE QUANTITY SHIFT IN NORTH GERMANIC

by Harry Perridon - Amsterdam

1. Syllable structure in Old Norse and the modern Scandinavian languages In the modern Scandinavian languages with the exception ofDanish stressed vowels are either long or are followed by a long consonant. Assuming that a syllable in these languages ends at the point where the speaker may pause his articulation, we might say that stress adds length to the end of the syllable 1: if the vowel is the possible resting point, it is lengthened under stress, in other cases it is the consonant immediately following the vowel that is lengthened. There is hence an opposition between open syllabies, which end in a long vowel, and closed syllabies, which end in a long consonant, but there is no op• position between long and short segments as such. Open and closed syllables are found in the following contexts (the examples are from Standard Swedish, the number of consonants pre• ceding the vowels is irrelevant in the context ofthis paper): v: trä [trE:] 'wood' v doesnot occur v:c läs [IE:S] 'read!' vc: less [IES:] 'sad' v:cv jäsa [jf::sa] 'to ferment' vc:a hjässa [jEs:a] 'skulI' v:cc jäst [jE:St] 'fermented' vc:c jäst [jES:t] 'yeast' This system of complementary length arose in the late Middle Ages from a more common type of system in which length was a property of segments. In Old Norse and Old Swedish, for instance, all four possible sequences ofvowel+ consonant occur, e.g.: vc vit 'wit', n.sg. nfa vcv fela 'to hide', info vc: vitt 'sorcery', n.sg. n/a vc:v fella 'to fell', inf. v:c s6t 'soot', n.sg. n/a. v:cv äta 'food', f.sg.nom. v:c: s6tt 'illness', m.sg.nom v:c:v ätta 'eight'

1 This use of the word syllable is perhaps not in line with most definitions of tbis concept. What I have in mind here is the following: Assume that you want to call the attention of a person who is called Anna. In Dutch or Danish you may lengthen the vowel: aaaa-na, in other words, you may wait some time before you start pro• nouncing the consonant; in Swedish and Norwegian such lengthening is not pos• sible; ifthe word is to be lengthened, you have to 'wait'on the consonant: annn-na. 70

In Old Norse poetry all stressed syllables were long except those end• ing in a short vowel in a bi- or polysyllabic word (e.g.: je-la 'to hide'). Syllables ending in a long vowel immediately followed by another vowel, as e.g. bit- in bita 'to live' were considered to be short. No difference is made between long and overlong syllabies. A number of sound changes that affected North Germanic and, in a later period, North Scandinavian, confirms the evidence from Old Norse verse: a distinction has to be made between short and long syllabies, but there is no change that only affects overlong syllabies. Riad (1992) suggests that a distinction be made between true and false overlong syllabies: sterns in which a long vowel is followed by two different consonants, e.g.: Mod. Swed. moln [mo:ln] 'cloud', are ac• cording to hirn not really overlong, since the consonant that im• mediately follows the long vowel (here the l) is not 'moraic', i.e. it does not belong to the syllable. The geminate tin Old Norse d6ttir 'daughter', on the other hand, has to be moraic, as the theory on which Riad builds his description ofthe Old Norse phonological system by definition assigns moraic status to geminates. I fail to see why gemi• nates cannot be extrametrical, non-moraic, as weil. Geminates (or 'long consonants') occur regularly in syllable-initial, non-moraic, position. Word-initial r in Spanish, for example, is always long, as is the r in the same position in the dialects of Smaland in South-East Sweden: long r's as weil as r's in word-initial position are uvular ('burred'), short ones trilIed. In the Swedish and Norwegian dialects that have a flapped, or 'thick', I there is the following distribution of flapped and non-flapped laterals: short I is (almost) always flapped, long or word-initial I is dental ('thin'). In Dutch all fricatives, nasals, liquids and half-vowels can be lengthened in syllable-initial position, the verb sissen 'to hiss', e.g., can be pronounced as [S:::I-S:::;:)], ifthe speechs situation calls for such emphatic lengthening. The evidence from Old Norse poetry and from the developments in the phonological systems of the Scandinavian languages thus all points in the same direction: syllables in North Germanic are either short (or 'light') or long (or 'heavy'). There is no need to distinguish a class of overlong syllabies. Somewhat more problematic is the fact that monosyllables with a short vowel were treated as long in Old Norse poetry, but were lengthened in the quantity shift (see below for details). Riad (1992) is one ofthe few linguists who claim that cvc-monosyllables were in• deed heavy, and, hence, that the final consonant was moraic in this