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

their orthographic presentation. Thus, it seems to be generally assumed
that the ON lenes were voiced in all positions, word-initially and wordmedially.
1 The fortes are often assumed to have been “aspirated,” although
the phonetic nature of this aspiration is rarely stated explicitly.
Scandinavian linguists have generally believed that, in Norwegian
and Swedish, the difference between word-initial and word-medial fortis
stops (e.g., Sw. tar ‘takes’ vs. hatar ‘hates’) is a question of degree of
postaspiration, and ultimately a function of stress (cf. discussion in Ch. 1,
section 1.1). Although this is seldom discussed explicitly, it seems that a
similar interpretation has been applied to ON as well. Thus, it appears to
be commonly assumed that the fortis stops of ON were postaspirated,
and that the degree of aspiration depended on stress in the same way as
has been assumed to be the case in Swedish and Norwegian. 2
The data from CSw reviewed in Chapter 4 suggest that such a view
of the production of fortis stops in Swedish and Norwegian is inaccurate.
In fact, the essential difference between word-initial and word-medial
stops in Scandinavian is neither a question of degree of postaspiration
nor of stress. This claim is supported by the following two empirical observations:
(i) when present, the aspiration of word-medial fortes takes
the form of preaspiration rather than postaspiration, and importantly,
many speakers tend neither to preaspirate nor postaspirate their wordmedial
fortes to any significant degree; and (ii), to be sure, a fortis stop
that occurs before a stressed vowel in Swedish or Norwegian is always
postaspirated and, in this sense, postaspiration is conditioned by stress.
However, a word-initial fortis stop is also always postaspirated, even if
the vowel that follows is unstressed (cf. Ch. 4, section 4.2.4). 3
1
The word-medial, postvocalic grapheme ‹g› is thought to have indicated a fricative
and not a stop.
2
However, cf., e.g., Lindroth (1927), Marstrander (1932) and Steblin-Kamenskij (1957;
cited in Hansson 1997:85) regarding doubts that the ON word-medial fortis stops were
postaspirated.
3
This situation has most likely come about in the following way. In ON, stress was
invariably initial, as it still is in Icelandic. Given that in ON, word-initial fortis stops
were postaspirated and word-medial stops were unaspirated or preaspirated, postaspiration
in ON was associated with both stress in the following vowel and word-initial
position. With the arrival in Swedish of loan words with medial or final stress, postaspiration
continued to be associated with both stress in the following vowel and
word-initial position, even though these no longer cooccurred. Thus, in a word like
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