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Beyging hvortveggi og hvor tveggja í tímans rás

Höfundur:	Katrín Axelsdóttir
Birtist í:	Íslensku máli og almennri málfræði: 27. árgangi, 2005, bls. 103 - 170

Útdráttur

The declension of hvortveggi and hvor tveggja — a historical survey

Keywords: historical morphology, language change, declension, analogy

In Icelandic, Old and Modern, there are two separate, synonymous pronouns, hvortveggi and hvor tveggja ‘both, each of two’. In hvortveggi both parts, hvor- and -tveggi, are declined. In hvor tveggja the first part is declined, the second is always tveggja (genitive of tveir ‘two’). To a certain extent the paradigms overlapped, as shown in tables 1 and 2.
The investigation deals with two main questions:

(1) Which was more common in Old Icelandic and up to the present day?

(2) What declensional changes have affected these pronouns and for what reasons?

In Old Icelandic hvortveggi is almost exclusively used and it still prevails in texts of the 16th to 18th centuries. Hvor tveggja is extremely rare until around 1500 and is fairly rare until the 19th century. In Modern Icelandic hvor tveggja is more common. In Norwegian, however, hvor tveggja is found in old texts. Editors of normalized texts have frequently substituted new forms for old, relying on their intuition as no studies of the problem were available. This includes Den norsk-islandske Skjaldedigtning B. Three declensional changes are mainly dealt with:

(1) Nom.fem.sg. hvortveggja → hvortveggi and nom.acc.neut.pl. hvortveggju → hvortveggi, see table 8.

(2) Dat.neut.sg. hvoru-tveggja → hvorutveggju, see table 9.

(3) Indeclinable hvoru- was introduced in the paradigm where it did not belong originally, see table 10.

The first two changes appeared sporadically and probably the former retreated. Those changes were apparently influenced by the declension of adjectives and several pronouns. Exact dating is difficult. The first certain examples of the indeclinable hvoru- appear in 15th century manuscripts. This gradually became more common and is still common in Modern Icelandic. The indeclinable hvoru- is in all probability due to a reaction against „Doppelflexion“ in the case of hvortveggi.

A chronological overview of the relative frequency of each paradigm is given in fig. 2 and of the changes in fig. 3.

The increased use of hvor tveggja and the introduction of the indeclinable hvoru- occurred approximately at the same time. Both may show a tendency to simplify the complicated declension of hvortveggi. If one of those options had been chosen and carried out it might have led to simplification. But the result was two separate and partly homonymous pronouns and many variant forms leading to an even greater irregularity. The increased use of another pronoun, báðir ‘both’, is apparently an attempt to avoid the confusion.

Katrín Axelsdóttir
Íslenskuskor Háskóla Íslands
Nýja-Garði við Sæmundargötu
IS-101 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
katax[at]hi.is