North Germanic Sound Shifts

Proto-Germanic > Proto-Norse > Old Norse > Icelandic

This is my attempt to gather the North Germanic sound shifts that Icelandic underwent since Proto-Germanic via Proto-Norse and Old Norse (Old Icelandic). The goal was to have a complete and machine readable list of sound changes representing present day knowledge. This goal is surely not achieved yet, but I want to present my data anyway in the hope that errors will be found this way. So this is OpenSource. :-)

I have used various sources, but don't rely on the result to be precise. Most importantly, don't rely on the given years of the sound changes, as they mainly served the purpose of sorting the rules. I appreciate very much any proposals for improvement!

I have tested the sound shifts with many Proto-Germanic and Proto-Norse words. Quite a few failed to arrive at Modern Icelandic by using the regular rules. A few options have been added to account for sound shift variants. This either means that there was free variation or that the precise constraints for a sound shift are unknown (to me). For the majority of the words I tested, my tests worked quite well, I feel. I have included a list that was created by using the standard settings without variants changed.

The machine readable file also includes sections for running Latin words through the sound shifts. You may safely ignore these if you are only interested in the history North-Germanic sound shifts.

The sound shift file ist here.

And the Perl sound shift compiler for that file is here.

List of Applying the Sound Shifts

The blue entries are provided, either as input or as reference. All other entries in the table are derived from the input values (either Proto-Germanic or Proto-Norse). The reference is the Old-Norse stage, which is marked in either green if the expected result is derived, or in red, if there is a different prediction.

Another problem was that my sources were contradictory. So some expected ON entries might be wrong. (faihiDo: > fa:Da? / feigD? (an input of 'faigiDo:' results is 'feigD'))