M. I.

S T E B L I N - K A h l E N S I i I J

SCANDINAVIAN B R E A K I N G FROM A
P H O N E M I C P O I N T OF V I E W

Scandinavian breaking has been in recent years the subject of

a lively discussion, which was opened by J. Svensson's' and
B. Hesselnian's' books and continued at the Scandinavists' Con-
gress in Copenhagen 194tiS and in a nuinher of articles.' Al-
though Svensson's and Hesselnian's theories were sharply cri-
ticized during the discussion, the stately structure set up by Axel
Iiock in his works on Scandinavian breaking" also gave way, and
n general return to views current before -1.Koclc h,as become
apparent. But the crucial innovation of the discussion was of
course a large-scale appeal to results of dialect research.
It must be admitted, however, that Scandinavian dialect material
affords a still less convincing explanation of Old Scandinavian
sound changes than do A. Rock's ingenious constructions. It is
indeed hardly probable that vowel changes in Scandinavian dia-
lects should repeat those in Old Scandinavian, inasmuch as the
vowel system that existed before breaking is quite unlike those
J. Svensson, Diftongering met1 palatalt fdrslag i ile nordiska sprdlcen,
1,und 1944. The book contains a survey of studies in Scandinavian breaking
111) to 1944 (pp. 13-37).
B. Hesselnian, Oniljutl ocli brgtning i tle nortliskn sprdken, Stockholm
1946.
ilcttr philologicrr Scnntlintivicn X I S , 19-47. pp. 3-GI.
' A. Janztn, Arkiv fijr nordisk filologi LIS, 1944. pp. 221-242; J. Svensson,
rlrXiv f d r nordisk filologi LX, 1945, pp. 18s-217; V. Jansson, iVnnin oc11
U y g d 19-L5, pp. 196-208; P. Naert, Bulletin ile la Socie'tt d e linguistique d e
Paris XLII, 2, 1942--1945, pp. 148-154; H. Andersen, drkiu f6r nordisk filo-
Iogi LXI, 194G, pp. 157-170; I. Hoff, Norsk tidsskrift for sprogvidenskap XIV,
1947, pp. 315-340, and drkiv fdr nordisk filologi LXIV, 1949, pp. 177-209;
L. Posti, Sprdkvetenskaplign scillsktrprts i Uppsnln fdrhnndlingnr, 1 9 4 6 1 9 1 5 ,
pp. 39-59; C. Harding, Arkiv f d r nordisk filologi LSI'II, 1952, pp. 198-210;
S. Bergsveinsson, Zeitschrift f u r Plionrtik IX, 2 , 1956, pp. 125-135; X. &I.
Nielsen, Actn philologiccr Scnndinavica S X I V , 1957, pp. 33-45. The last article
contains a general survey of the discussion.
" Especially: Umlnirt iind Brechung i m dltschwctlisclien, Lund 1911--1916,
pp. 248-324.

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 SCANDINAVlAN BREAKING

that exist in Scandinavian dialects to-day. The Scandinavian

trend of development etc., i. e. a trend active throughout the
whole history of Scandinavian languages, is a fiction to a still
greater degree than A. Iiocks epenthesis (that is the supposed
penetration of an unstressed vowel into the stressed syllable).
Phonetic trends change with phonemic structure. Structural
similarity is a surer base for analogies than cognate relationship.
But a diachronic phonemic approach is far from popular in
Scandinavia. It is than not to be wondered at that, although re-
ferences to vowel system occur in works on Scandinavian
breaking, the word system in these works seems to be used
rather as a charm than to express a phonological concept.
Meanwhile there are at least four points in connexion will1
Scandinavian breaking that could be treated phonemically. These
four points are: 1) the nature of Scandinavian /Z/ before breaking;
2) the influence of the unstressed / u ul upon /a/ of the preceding
syllable; 3) the product of breaking; 4) breaking and the syncope
of unstressed vowels.

1. The Nriture of Sccindinavirrn 121 before Breaking

In the period immediately preceding breaking there s e e m lo
have existed five vowels (all of them both short and long) :
i u
e o
Cl

A five vowel sysleiii is attested in very inany languages (but iiot

in Scandinavian languages or dialects after the i-mutation of
Y

ic 0 d!), for instance in Latin, Spanish. Russian, Czech, Modern

Greek, Japanese, Georgian, many Amerindian languages, etc.
etc.
However, five vowel systems vary greatly depending on the
phonemic contrast between /i e/ and / u 01. The former may be

E. g. I. Hoff, Norsk titissliriff for sprogvidenskup XIV, 1347, p. 335;

P. Naert, op. cit., p. 154; S. Rergsveinsson, op. cit., p. 131.
Cf. Ch. F. Hocliett, it Mtrnunl o[ Phonology, Unltimore 1955, pp. S5-Sti.
N. S . Trubetzkop, Grundrfige der Plionologie, Prague 1939, pp. 90-92;
IIocltett, loc. c i f .
 M. I. GTEBLIN-KAMENSKIJ

opposed to the latter as front-unrounded versus back-rounded

(the commonest case), but the contrast may be also unrounded
versus rounded with tongue-position irrelevant (this is the case
in Iiussian) or front versus back with lip-rounding irrelevant
(this is reported for Japanese). In order to find out which of
these subtypes is involved, one must know how the phonemes in
question vary from one environment to another. If /i e/ have both
front and back (or central) allophones, or / u o / have both back
and front (or central) allophones, it is then apparent that tongue-
position is irrelevant for these phonemes, or in other words that
phonemically they are simply unrounded and rounded.
Thus, stressed vowels in Russian vary as to tongue-position in
different environment, and particularly under the influence of
the contiguous consonants. They are front or back (or central)
according to their positi0n.O Stressed vowels in Russian may be
also more or less diphthongal depending on their position.l0 In
particular, /el may have an [i]-like onset (especially after a
palatalized consonant) and an [a]-like terminal portion or off-
glide (before a non-palatalized consonant and especially before a
velar I ) , that is it may change during its articulation from a
i'ront vowel to a vowel neutral as to tongue-position, remaining
all the time unrounded."
We know very well how Scandinavian /d 6/ varied in the period
immedifately preceding the i-mutation of these vowels: depending
on their position (more exactly, depending on the quality of the
vowel in the following syllable, and not of the contiguous con-
sonants, as is the case in Russian) they were back or front, hut
remained rounded, and these back and front allophones became
later on phonemically distinct through i-mutation, i. e. rounded
phonemes /fi 61 split into front-rounded I; 0'1 and back-rounded
/ii 6i."
From what happened to / e / as a result of breaking we may
infer that under certain conditions /?/ changed during its articula-
tion from a front vowel to a vowel neutral as to tongue-position,
Trubetzkoy, op. cit., p. 91; R. I. Avanesov, Fonetikn sovremennogo riisskogo
jazgka, Moskva 1956, pp. 88, 95, 97.
lo Trubetzkoy, o p . cit., p. 91, footnote.

l1 Avnnesov, o p . cif., p. 100-101.

12 H. Penzl, .+trki; f6r nortlisk filologi LX\:I, 1051, pp. 1-15.

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 SCANDINAVIAN BREAKING

that is had an allophone [ e a ] ,etc., which later on became / i d ,

etc."
All this justifies one in concluding that, before the i-mutation
of /fl 61 and the breaking of 121, Scandinavian Ji ZJ were phone-
mically differentiated from /fi 6/ as unrounded versus rounded,
while tongue-position was irrelevant for all of them, and that this
was the conditioning factor both for the i-mutation of /fl 61 and
for the breaking of 121.
If?/ seems to have had no allophones similar to those which re-
sulted in breaking, and this is readily accounted for by the fact
that, although short and long vowels coincided in their distinctive
features, they may have differed phonetically. If?/, which later on
diphthongized over a large territory (but most probably for quite
different reasons), must have been more close than /Z/,since i t
originated from Germanic It?'/, opposed to the more open /2'/,
which later on differentiated into /ti/." The rendering of If?/ by
the rune i in zuilagnii (Lindholm), wilcrld (Overhornbzk), uuildd
(Vasby)Is may be a n evidence for this.

2. T h e Influence of the Unstressed l a u/ upon lei of the

Preceding Syllable
It follows from the foregoing that the influence from the un-
stressed / a u/ upon /El of the preceding syllable (as well as the
influence from the unstressed /i/ upon /fi 61) does not imply any
epenthesis at all. It implies merely that, since tongue-position was
irrelevant for /i/, under certain conditions this , Z/ could change
during its articulation from a front vowel to a vowel neutral as to
tongue-position or a backer vowel, and, inasmuch as regressive
vowel assimilation was generally characteristic for the period,
this happened of course in the first place before the unstressed
/a u / , which were (unless followed by /i/ etc.) either neutral as to
tongue-position, or back. But backness was surely more charact-
eristic of /ul than of / d , since after i-mutation backness became
The discussion on breaking showed that Svensson scarcely succeeded in
proving that the primary product of breaking was ice, io and not in, io (see
especially I. Hoff, Norsk tidsskrift f o r sproyuidensknp XIV. 1947, pp. 328-335).
*' See 3. Trnlca, Casopis pro rnotierni filologii XXII, 2, 1936, p. 150;J. Pury-
lovicz, Biuletyn polskiego toiunrrystwtr j Fykornaiuczego XI, 1952, p. 50.
W. Krause, Runeninschrilten im iilteren Futhark, Hnlle 1937, p. 656.
 Ail. I. STEBLIN-KAMENSKIJ

relevant for 1111, while it remained irrelevant for Id,and niost

probably this is why the influence of / u / , as shown conclusively
by I. Hoff,I6 was stronger than that of Id. It is quite probable,
however, that not only vowels but to a certain extent also con-
sonants were active in Scandinavian breaking, just as not only
consoiiants but also voweks seem to have been active in Old Eng-
lish breaking."
Thus an interplay of phonetic and phonological factors seems to
have been at work.

3. The Product of Breciking

It is generally considered that Scandinavian breaking is a diph-
thongization. But if a diphthong is a unit phoneme and not a
phoneme cluster, then breaking is hardly a diphthongization, since
the sounds resulting from breaking and rendered in Old Scandi-
navian languages by digraphs ici, io, etc., are manifestly bipho-
nemic, as shown by the following considerations.
1) The first element of these combinations seems to form ana-
logous combinations with any vowel (except / i / , of course), both
short and long, and even with a diphthong. Thus, Noreen posits
the following combinations for Old Icelandic: in, ie, io, iu, iy, ip,
iQ, id, ie', ili, ib. ib and even inri and for Old Norwegian also ice;'s for
Old Swedish: ici, io, in, icv, io, ic7, id, i0, icE, and dialectally also
iy, ie, ig, iP.'O There is no reason to doubt that these combinations
(or at least most of them) really occurred as sound clusters and
not merely as digraphs. The fact that the first element of these
combinations was usually rendered by the letter i, and that in Old
Icelandic poetry it always alliterated with a vowel and not with a
consonant, must not necessarily mean that this element was pho-
netically a vowel.zoIts rendering by i seems rather to mean that,
although it was a semivocalic [i] or probably even a consonantal
[ j ] : it was an allophone of /i/, possibly because / j / disappeared as a
lo Arkiu fijr nordisk filologi LXIV, 1949.
I. lioff, op. cit., p. 1S7. There must have existed also a structural similarity
between Old English arid Scandinavian / E / . Concerning the connexion between
Old English and Scandinavian breaking see also G. T. Floni, Language SIII,2,
1937, pp. 123-13G.
la A. Noreen, ;lltisliinrlische Crcunnicctil;. Halle 1923, p. 45.

A. Noreen, dltscluuetlische Crccmnlcttik, Halle 1904, p. 48.

2o As F, Dietrich assumed (Germctnicl 1867, pp. 385-4211.

5s
 S C A N D I N A V I A N BREAKING

separate phonemic unity after its loss at the beginning of a word"

and its development into vocalic [i] in a number of positions.''
2) The second element of these combinations takes part in
regular alternations in just the same way as do separate phonemes.
This is best shown by the perfect parallelism of the ia : i p and
n: p alternations in Old Icelandic. It is this parallelism that favours
the assumption (rejected by A. Iiock and his followers) that io
(or ip) is the product of the u-mutation of ici and not of breaking
directly.'x It is also not without reason that already in 9th-10th
centuries p rhymed consistently with i p in Old Icelandic poetry.''
3) Notwithstanding all the imperfection of the younger runic
alphabet, where the new phonemes /g 6,lfound no expression whnt-
ever, the combinations resulting from breaking found consistent
evpressioii in younger runic inscriptions as ici or iu (e. g. in fici-
kurcr, icik, ziiirtk, fiurbiurn, etc.), owing no doubt to their being
combinations of phonemes already existing in the language, and
not new phonemes.
To be sure it could be assumed that, between the period when
[ea] etc. was an allophone of /Z/ and that later period when pho-
neme cluster /id had appeared, a period intervened when the pro-
duct of breaking was a separate diphthongal phoneme. The fact is,
however, that such a diphthongal phoneme would hardly fit into
the vowel system. It is difficult to say whether the old Icru ciil were
during the period of breaking still biphonemic, which they un-
doubtedly had been in Proto-Germani~.'~ But at any rate, even if
they were unit phonemes during the period of breaking, they
were, as shown by their behaviour throughout their history, equi-
valent to long vowels. Long or equivalent to consonant +long vowel
were combinations / i n i d that originated from Germanic leu/.
Noreen, Altisl. Cr., p. 168.
** Op. cit., p. 16.5.
'' So J. Grimni already (Deutsche Crctmmtrtik 1940, I, p. 540) and later
many other scholars (see I<. AI. Nielsen, o p . cit., p. 33).
" F. J6nsson. drkiv f a r nordisk filologi XSI, 1905, pp. 244-256, and Norsk-
islantlske Kultur- 00 Sprogforlioltl i 9. og 10. drh., Robenhavn 1921, p. 243.
" See I3. Trnka, op.cit., p. 156, where it is pointed out that this is shown
by their disintegrating before a vowel in Gothic (cf. ttrrtjnn and tnwidn, bai
and bnjo,5s) and their elements developing in Old Germanic languages in the
same way as do the respective phonemes outside of thew combinations. Thus
in North Germanic the development of /dwithin /nil and that of /n/ through
i-mutation are perfectly parallel.
 M. I. STEBLIN-KAMENSKIJ

Whereas combinations that developed from /Z/ were manifestly

short (or equivalent to consonant+short vowel).
There is no doubt, however, that the change from [ea] to lial
was promoted by the simultaneous existence of l i d , where, as in
/ i d , the second and the more open vowel is syllabic, and not the
first.
Thus it appears that, in contradistinction to the Scandinavian
Y

i-mutation of /(1 U U / , Scandinavian breaking was not a split of a

phoneme into two new ones, but a development of a unit phoneme
into a phoneme cluster, or in other words, not a paradigmatic
phonemic split, but a syntagmatic one.
A detailed phonemic analysis of reflexes of /?/ in different Old
Scandinavian languages would show how this phoneme cluster
varied from language to language, but would hardly necessitate
any modification of the statement made aboye.

4. Breaking and the Syncope of Unstressed Vowels

Two different processes are usually meant by breaking: 1) the
rise of an allophone [ea] etc. in /2/; 2) the development of this allo-
phone into a phoneme cluster lid etc.
The first is a phonetic process that does not involve any change
in the phonemic composition of words, and therefore does not as
a rule find any expression in writing and cannot be disturbed by
grammatical analogy, that is eliminated where phonetic conditions
demand its presence, or vice versa.aa
The second is a phonemic process that does involve a change in
the phonemic composition of words, and therefore as a rule does
find expression in writing (though may be not at once). This
change in the phonemic composition of words naturally can be
disturbed by grammatical analogy (therefore the existence of
words with phonemic breaking, but without /ti/ or /u/ in the
following syllable, does not prove that breaking was a spontaneous
diphthongization, etc.) .
It is obvious that phonetic breaking must have occurred before
the syncope of finstressed vowels, and quite probably it occurred
long before phonemic breaking and consequently long before
breaking was indicated in writing. Thus it probably had already
occurred in h e l d a n in Tjurkii inscription and may be still earlier.
2a Cf. B. Irnlta, Slouo (I sloucsnost, 11, 1336,pp. 221-2.

90
 SCANDINAVIAN BREAKING

Below by breaking will be meant only phonemic breaking.

If breaking, similarly to the i-mutation of / f i 8 k / ,had been a
phonemic split, that is a rise of new phonemes, it would have been
natural to suppose that the allophones of the old phonemes became
new phonemes when these allophones ceased to be conditioned
(and thus no longer were in complementary distribution), since the
conditioning factor, that is the unstressed /ci u / , had disappeared,
and that thus the loss of unstressed vowels was compensated by
the appearance of new phonemes. But since breaking did not in-
volve a rise of new phonemes, it is more probable that it was due
to the diphthongal allophone of /Z/ coinciding in its onset with the
non-syllabic allophone of /i/ of such combinations as /ia,id as a
result of gradual phonetic change. Thus it is the existence of such
combinations that made breaking possible.
A connexion between breaking and the syncope is not probable
also because breaking must have preceded the rise of and
consequently the syncope of the unstressed /i/ (which caused the
rise of these phonemes), since the rise of front-rounded phonemes
/ g must have converted /fi 61 and /??/ into back-rounded and
front-rounded phonemes respectively and thus made impossible
the development of a n allophone of / d l neutral as to tongue-position
(that is [ea] etc.).
A connexion between breaking and the syncope is further im-
probable because, as has been said, Scandinavian breaking seems
to have been conditioned by the influence not only of the un-
stressed /a/ and / u / , but also of the contiguous consonants, which
did not disappear at all.
Thus breaking must have preceded both the syncope and the
i-mutation of /fi 6 ti/.
Leningrad.

So far as 1 know, 0. Brenner was the first to point out the connexion

between the loss of the assimilating vowel and the rise of a new distinction in
the assimilaJed vowel (Altnordisches Huntlbuch, LeipZig 1882, p. 55). See also
B. rmka, Cusopis pro moderni filologii XXII, 2, 1936, p. l69. .I consistent
phonemic treatment of mutations is to be bound in W. F. Twaddell, iVonafs-
hefte fur deutsclien Unterricht XXS, 1938, pp. 177-181: H. Penzl, Language
XXV, 1949, pp. 223-240, and .lrliiv f6r norclisk filologi LSVI, 1961. pp. 1-15.
See especially I. Hoff, Arkiu f o r nordisk filologi LXIY, 1949, pp. 177-209.
See also L. Posti, o p . cit.

91