Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

[mh] ‘food’ is used, and for function words the interrogative pronoun
hvat [kvh] ‘what.’ The lenis stop in such contexts will be exemplified
by radari [] ‘radar.’
In ON, there does not seem to have been a fortis vs. lenis stop
contrast in VC syllables. Thus words exemplified by fótur, matur and
hvat had their origins in stops that were usually represented orthographically
as p, t, k. When b, d, g occurred in the spelling in such contexts,
they probably represented voiced fricatives. With the advent of loan
words in Faroese, postvocalic b, d, g have become part of the spelling
norms. 1 Whether this coincides with the emergence of a fortis vs. lenis
contrast in VC syllables is a matter of speculation.
Finally, a stop + voiceless consonant is exemplified by the word seks
[sehks] ‘six.’ Such contexts do not have a fortis vs. lenis contrast. The
example word is transcribed here with a preaspiration, but the data show
that stops in such contexts are variously produced as fricatives without a
stop closure, as voiceless unaspirated stops, or as preaspirated stops. The
most frequently occurring clusters of this type in the data come from ON
ks/x, k(k)t and g(g)t.
Syllables with primary and secondary lexical stress are grouped
together in this analysis. Thus the analysis does not, for example, make a
distinction between the t’s in bátur ‘boat’ and seglbátur ‘sail boat’. With
regard to the t, both are treated as matur type words. Also, although a
stop in an exemplifying words is usually intervocalic, the words occurring
in the data are not necessarily followed by a vowel. For example, the
word mitt ‘middle’ may occur utterance-finally or before a word starting
with a consonant, but it still belongs to the átta word type.
Some stops that occur in a word-medial, postvocalic context were
excluded from the analysis. This applies to stops that occur after a
morpheme boundary (e.g., skattakista ‘treasure chest’) and stops that are
in the onset of a stressed syllable (e.g., mobilt ‘mobile’). Both types of
context trigger the production of the type of stop that occurs word-
1 However, the spelling is not a good indicator of the fortis vs. lenis contrast in VC
syllables, since some borrowings are spelt with p, t, k despite being lenis, for example
sleta [slet] ‘sleigh.’ Thus, for VC syllables, one should note that even if the exemplifying
word for fortis has t and the one for lenis has d, other lenis words may have
p, t, k in their spelling.
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