On the History of the Icelandic Pronouns nokkur and nokkuð. An examination of selected manuscripts from the 13th to the 16th century

Abstract

In his article “Óákv. forn. nokkur, nokkuð” published in Lingua Islandica — Íslenzk tunga in the years 1961­62 Hreinn Benediktsson presents a very thorough study of the Icelandic indefinite pronouns nokkur and nokkuð, especially concerning their earliest development. When in the year 2002 a revised and translated version of this article was published in Hreinn Benediktsson’s collected papers “Linguistic Studies, Historical and Comparative” no new major contributions on the history of these pronouns had appeared. The lack of sufficient data was mentioned by Hreinn Benediktsson already in 1961­62, and in 2002 he still discusses more or less the same problems based on an insufficient amount of data (Hreinn Benediktsson 1961­62:29; 2002:495­96). As a consequence some aspects of the history of the Icelandic pronouns nokkur, nokkuð still deserve further examination. The present work aims at finding answers to the following three questions:1.What was the nature of the change of the vowel in the first syllable? When did the change from /ö/ to /o/ happen?2.When do the first indications of u­syncope in trisyllabic forms appear, i.e. when does the stem nokkr­ appear?3.What was the development of word­final -rr and intervocalic r(r) in these pronouns?To do this, it was necessary to set up a corpus with sufficient data. This data was extracted from nineteen Jónsbók manuscripts from the late thirteenth century until the late sixteenth century.