Are Icelandic unstressed diphthongs in loanwords supposed to be reduced?
In Icelandic, certain accented vowel letters (especially ó, á) are consistently explained as diphthongs ([ou] and [au], respectively) in pronunciation guides.
Accented vowel letters are also encountered in many loanwords, perhaps to emphasize the foreign origin of a particular vowel. This frequently includes "ó". For example:
- "apótek" (pharmacy; the loanword competes with a domestic synonym)
- "sólkóróna" (sun corona)
- "Indónesía"
The source languages, as far as I can tell, did not supply those accents in any way that would be obvious to me. It´s something to do with Icelandic itself.
Wherever such a foreign "ó" occurs in an unstressed syllable, I find it reduced from [ou] to [o] in native pronunciation. For example, "sólkóróna" would be pronounced [soulkorona], while "kóróna" would be pronounced "kourona".
I often even find the same online resource giving the pronunciation transcribed as [ou], accompanied with a recorded careful native pronunciation that has a monophthongal [o]. (Example - hvalur.org for apótek.)
- Is the monophthong just in my own ears, or is this reduction a well-documented phenomenon?
- Is the reduction obligatory? And when exactly?
- Can anyone provide examples or counter-examples for any other diphthongs, such as á, æ, au, ei or é?
(Note: such examples are somewhat hard to come by. Only unstressed syllables in foreign morphemes would qualify. The closest I was able to find was "Kristján", which is a very common first name within Iceland, is surely pronounced with the due diphthong. Likewise - "milljón" gets its corresponding diphthong, at least in dictionary-like contexts. Perhaps neither of those is perceived as a foreign word in Icelandic, or perhaps there are other factors at play.) - Why are so many loanwords receiving Icelandic-specific accents (á, é, í, ó, ú, ý) anyway? How are those accent marks supposed to interact with the pronunciation?
1 answer
A peculiar feature of Icelandic is that it distinguishes vowel length, not just for pure vowels, but also for diphthongs. (Vowel length does not distinguish meaning, or at least not directly; it is determined from the context, such as syllable stress and coda composition, rather mechanically.)
Any diphthongs in unstressed syllables are always short. Being short, they have a tendency to be reduced to barely recognizable diphthongs, or often even to pure vowels. This holds for both loanwords and for domestic vocabulary (of Old Norse origin).
It may well be that unstressed diphthongs get reduced more often in loanwords then in domestic words, but I have no proof nor reference nor explanation for that.
It is even less clear to me what determines how a given loanword enters Icelandic (i.e., "kóróna" vs. *"korona"), although some light is thrown on that topic by the thesis/article "I prestiti di origine latina in islandese moderno: un glossario" by Matteo Tarsi. For "kóróna" specifically, Tarsi attests the word in Icelandic by the 13. century at the latest, when this spelling still indicated a long pure vowel /ó/, whereas the same spelling would probably shift to be pronounced /au/, same as in current Icelandic, by the 14. century or so. The word can be assumed to be a direct borrowing from Latin (and ultimately from Greek). The second "ó" is both long and stressed in Latin, so it is unsurprising that it was kept long in Icelandic. The first "ó" is short and unstressed in Latin, and stressed in 13. century Icelandic; for a reason unknown to me, it received the long vowel in Icelandic, too. However, the point is that the diphthongization of the long vowel (demonstrable in stressed syllables, at least) came about only later.
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