Sandhi in an Old Icelandic Manuscript

The linguist who works with older stages of a language is faced with serious problems in applying descriptive techniques. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulties lies in the lack of adequate information concerning stress, pitch, and juncture.l It is then of considerable interest if on rare occasions we find some trace of these suprasegmental features in a manuscript or a printed text. The material to be presented here deals with one such trace in Old Icelandic. Manuscript NRA 52 is one of the earliest in Old Icelandic. Unfortunately it is preserved only in six fragments;2 but enough text is available to permit analysis, though the limitations placed upon it by extralinguistic conditions must be borne in mind. The Old Icelandic preposition which is usually normalized as um shows the variant forms um and umnb. Since both forms occur in several of the oldest manuscripts, this is probably an allomorphic variation. In NRA 52, as I wish to show, the variation is phonologically conditioned, and one of the conditioning factors is a type of juncture. As the basic form of the morpheme I choose umb. Historically umb (the b-form, as opposed to the m-form) is the older; cf. OHG umbi, OS umbi, OE ymb(e). Only the b-form is found in the earliest manuscripts; in slightly later ones the m-form occurs beside the b-form or to the exclusion of it. In NRA 52 umb occurs seven times. I give the occurrences in unnormalized form, and number them for ease of reference. The translations are fairly literal.3 (1) ... .oc r%Sba vm me) s.r. ... 'and (they) speak about (it) among themselves' (6.7-8) (2) ... .oc ma tat verb?a enn til vmbdta nacqvarra of hitt malit. 'and that can then still be some improvement concerning this affair' (11.24-5) (3) ... bibi vmb orb oc atgon[go ...] 'both concerning (his) words and (his) help' (5.10-1) (4) [bat e]r vmb at r,Sba ... 'that is to be spoken about' (9.1) (5) ... er sigldi vmb oss fyrr ... 'who sailed past us before' (10.10) (6) ... .oc ma ecci of pat r4ba.eftir bv[i sem var.at eigi ero] sva vitni vmb.bau Qll er t0cilig ero. 'and (one) can not talk about that-accord

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