The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse

Download or read book The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse written by Martin Syrett and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1994-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse attempts to analyse the unaccented vowel system attested in the proto-Norse period, as partially attested in the older runic inscriptions in the elder futhark. Each chapter in turn assesses the evidence for unaccented syllables of a particular category, whether inflectional or derivational, and decides whether any reliable conclusions can be drawn from it. It is argued that too many widely accepted views are based on insufficient and poor methodology, and that too little note has been taken of the fact that viable alternatives exist alongside most of our theories about proto-Norse. In particular, a new realisation that the inscriptions are written in a less than perfect orthographic system, a notion that many scholars have often been unwilling to accept, leads to some interesting new interpretations of the data.