SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Saga-Book of the Viking Society
statement is the occurrence of 'pt.' (rather than 'ft.') spellings in
Old Icel. Such spellings are attested in all the medieval
Scandinavian languages, however, not only in Icel., and they occur
side by side with the 'ft' notation. In one and the same
manuscript we may find eftir or eptir, craftr or craptr etc. As
Hreinn Benediktsson has pointed out, the distinction between stop
and spirant must have been neutralised before [t] in Germanic,
a reflex of the IE devoicing of [b] in this position.!" We have no
way of knowing for sure what the exact pronunciation of 'ft' or
'pt' was in any medieval Scandinavian dialect, but the
fluctuation in spelling cannot be unconnected with the
neutralisation of the stop/spirant distinction. Thus the
appearance of 'pt' in Old Icel. for etymological ft is no indication
that the pronunciation of this consonant combination was [c'I>t]
in that language. Given this, the inconsistent distinction in Old
Icelandic spelling: 'p'+'t' : 'f" ± other consonants or vowels
cannot help us to decide whether the change [c'I>] >[f] occurred
before or after the time of the earliest Icelandic manuscripts, let
alone whether it happened "early", i.e. long before the
manuscript age. As for the early Scandinavian inscriptions
themselves, they contain no indication of the exact sound
represented by the 'f'-rune. However, the fact that inscriptions
in the younger fupark occasionally represent the reflex of IE p
by the 'b'-rune18 (in spite of Krause's assertion to the contrary,
p. 43: "In den Runeninschriften wurde aber in allen Stellungen
von Anfang an nur die f-rune verwendet"] suggests that in the
Viking Age and later the pronunciation was still [c'I>].
4. On p. 39, where in connection with the 'b'