Getting Your Head Around: the Vowel System of Modern Icelandic

The vowel system of Modern Icelandic, unlike that of Old Icelandic, continues to spawn different interpretations. Scholars do not appear to be nearer any consensus of views than they were in 1960, when the distinguished Russian linguist, Steblin-Kamenskij, commenting on the situation, noted with some playfulness: ... are we to infer that it is the more difficult to reconstruct a phonemic system the more we know the phonetic nature of the phonemes involved? (Steblin-Kamenskij 1960:36). There can be no doubt that the phonetic data of Modern Icelandic are both generally available and have figured in numerous studies, including acoustic and experimental, during the past century (Steblin-Kamenskij 1966 provides an exhaustive survey of earlier research, for more recent research see also Pétursson 2000, Árnason 2005). With Old Icelandic, the phonetic detail is obviously scanty and often totally unavailable, hence many questions can be asked but few can be answered: were the segments transcribed [t, d] dental, alveolar or post-alveolar? Was the vowel [e] almost half-close or was it more open, almost [E], or was it anywhere in between? Was it fully front or partly retracted? Was it purely monophthongal or was it, as in the case of its long congener in the modern language, diphthongal, where the transcription [E] or even [IE] (see Árnason 2005) would be closer to phonetic reality? Questions like these are legion as obviously any detailed phonetic study of living speech is bound to reveal the presence of considerable variation of,