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

For the sake of simplicity and lucidity, I have generally chosen to
stick to the rather loose term “Old Norse” rather than make use of terms
with more precise time frames such as Proto-Nordic, Old East Nordic,
Old West Nordic and Old Icelandic. In my text, Old Norse can be taken
to refer to those features that are common to the dialects spoken in Scandinavia,
the Faroes and Iceland around 750–1000 AD. The phonological
organisation of the stop system is one of the features considered to be
common to these dialects.
Further license is taken in that word examples from Old Icelandic
texts are passed off as Old Norse. Again, this is done for the sake of
exposition, and in the belief that the phonological organisation of the
stop system remained fairly stable over time. These examples will be
presented in a normalised orthography in italics. As such, they indicate
the major phonological contrasts that existed within Old Norse, not their
exact or even approximate phonetic realisations.
Similarly, the use of the terms “fortis” and “lenis” should not be
interpreted as a statement about the phonetic character of these stop categories.
Instead, these terms are simply used to differentiate between the
two stop series on an abstract level. For all intents and purposes I could
have used such terms as “series-A” stop and “series-B” stop, but I
wished to refrain from introducing such new terminology.
The languages and dialects discussed are categorised by countries.
However, one should be aware that often a sharp linguistic boundary
does not exist between Swedish and Norwegian. In the case of several
Central Scandinavian dialects, particularly those of Härjedalen and
Dalarna, dialects that could be classified as Norwegian are now on the
Swedish side of the border (Hansson, 1997:53). Also, the dialects in the
western part of Jämtland in Sweden have a mixture of Swedish and Norwegian
features.
3.2 Icelandic
Already in the latter half of the 19 th century, phoneticians seem to
have been aware that Icelandic had preaspirated stops. For instance,
Henry Sweet describes preaspiration in Icelandic in his Handbook of
Phonetics from 1877. Among Scandinavian dialectologists, general
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