Lang. Soc. 4, 323-339.

Printed in Great Britain

Pronominal address in Icelandic: from you-two to you-all

A Review Article by

EINAR HAUGEN
Harvard University

The conservatism of modern Icelandic is a bromide so well worn that it is re-

freshing now and then to be reminded that Icelandic has in fact changed from
that Old Norwegian which the settlers brought with them in the ninth century,
and that it is not, in the words of a recent writer, 'eine versteinerte Sprachform'
(D6csy 1973: 48). One striking change, which involves phonological, morpho-
logical, syntactic, and sociolinguistic problems, is that of the dual and plural
pronouns of the first and second persons. Succinctly stated: ON vit 'we' dual and
pit 'you' dual have become viS 'we' plural and pid 'you' plural, while ON ver
'we' plural and per 'you' plural have become 'we' honorific and 'you' honorific.
A systematic shift of meaning has affected both pronouns, eliminating the dual
meaning in favor of the plural, and the plural in favor of the honorific singular.
This change has now been made the theme of a doctoral dissertation submitted
at the University of Reykjavik in 1973 by Helgi GuQmundsson.1 The volume is
written in flawless English, is of reasonable length and easy to read, and should
be brought to the attention of scholars interested in problems of pronominal
address, a topic that has been much mooted of late. The volume is congenial to
me personally because it takes up again the parallel development in Norwegian
dialects studied by Tylden (1944), which I had the pleasure of reviewing (1947).
The author fits both developments into earlier treatments of the pronouns in
German, Swedish, and Faroese. He assigns the Icelandic change to the 17th
century, and attributes the loss of the dual to the rise of the honorific.
The problem may seem a small one to some, and hardly worthy of an entire
monograph or a doctor's degree. I would reject this view, since any linguistic
problem can serve to elucidate basic mechanisms in human communication. I
believe that this particular problem illustrates in microcosm some of the major
interests of linguistics in the past hundred and fifty years, and that as such it is
worthy not only of the attention given it here, but of further study in contexts as
wide as those of language itself.
Chapter 1 bears the modest title of 'Introduction', but here the author has set
himself the task of providing a theoretical background for the use of the dual.

[1] GuSmundsson, Helgi. The Pronominal Dual in Icelandic. Institute of Nordic Lin-
guistics: Reykjavik, Iceland. 1972. 140 pp. In substance this article is identical with my
'opposition' delivered on the occasion of its defence.

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

Like so much else in linguistics these days, the study of the dual goes back to
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1827 became the first to call attention to its
extraordinary interest from the point of view of general linguistics (Humboldt
1963). From having been thought of as an oddity of Greek or at best Indo-
European grammar, it was now realized that the dual is or has been a category
in the most diverse languages around the world. While our author tells us that
the dual occurs in all five continents, he says nothing at all about its occurrence
outside Europe and Asia. One result is that he misses an opportunity to point out
some of the variations in the use of duality, e.g. a characteristic noted for several
Philippine languages where the dual pronoun is limited to the speaker and hearer,
i.e. is 'inclusive' only, and not like the Icelandic, which is either inclusive or
exclusive of the hearer (Conklin 1962; McKaughan 1959; Thomas 1955).
Pursuing these and other anthropological studies of the distinctive features of
pronominal systems (especially Conklin 1962) would have given greater depth
to his treatment of the Icelandic pronouns. Instead of dismissing rather sum-
marily such an article as Buchler & Freeze (1966) as a 'complicated presentation
of a number of features found in pronominal systems' (p. 15, fn. 1), he might
have given us more insight into what Roman Jakobson has called the 'complex
code of verbal attitudes towards the addressee' (Sebeok i960; 278). Recent
studies by Pike and associates have advanced important new analyses of
pronominal reference (Pike & Lowe 1969; Pike 1973).
To most of us the dual is a puzzling category in grammar, since we think of
'two' as merely a digit between 'one' and 'three'. But as Humboldt pointed out,
the dual reflects a dualistic world view 'in dem Satz und Gegensatz, dem Setzen
und Aufheben, dem Seyn und Nicht-Seyn, dem Ich und der Welt' (1963: 137).
In Hammerich's words, writing about Eskimo, it is not so much 'Zweizahl als
Paarzahl'; his Eskimos were not so much interested in asking how many there
were, but whether they occurred 'Paarweise' (1959: 17). The dual has two chief
roots in human experience: (1) the symmetry of the human body itself, with its
left and right eyes, ears, shoulders, breasts, arms, and legs; (2) the duality of
many human relationships, which sociologists have now dignified with the word
'dyads', such as father-son, mother-daughter, husband-wife, but above all the
relationship of speaker and hearer.
Brugmann made the additional observation that 'Der Dual bezeichnete die
Gepaartheit als solche, der Plural aber Hess diesen Nebenbegriff unberiick-
sichtigt' (Brugmann 1911: 446). This formulation corresponds exactly to the
conception launched by the Prague School concerning the 'marked' and 'un-
marked' members of a paradigm (Jakobson 1964). Greenberg in a thorough study
of this concept used the dual in Sanskrit as an example: in comparison with the
singular, the plural was marked; but in comparison with the plural, the dual was
marked (Greenberg 1966: 76). This means, among other things, that the plural
may be used for the dual when the two merge or overlap, and that the plural is

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
likely to be more frequent than the dual (I have found in Egil's Saga, for example,
that there are 327 or 71.8 per cent plural to 130 or 28.2 per cent dual pronouns,
cf. E. Haugen (1942)). In view of the recent upsurge of marking theory in
linguistics, this would be a useful line of inquiry to pursue.
The question of whether the dual is a so-called 'primitive' feature in language,
as suggested by many writers, may be an idle will-o'-the-wisp, as our author
maintains (p. 94). But I think it is worth considering, since many distinguished
linguists from Meillet and Wackernagel to Brugmann and Tylden have used it to
explain the disappearance of the dual. Now that Watkins (1969) has shown that
it was probably not an Indo-European category, we should rather ask why it has
apparently been revived from time to time through the history of these languages.
Helgi is rather casual in merely referring in a footnote to what he calls 'the old
theory of the origin of the dual pronouns' without even specifically stating it or
suggesting a better one (p. 11, fn. 1). If the Germanic *wit and *jut (>*jit)
have their t from the word for 'two', then these are simply pronominal phrases
that have been worn down to monosyllables. Tesniere (1925: 262) similarly
found that Slovenian and Lithuanian reinforced the old duals by adding 'two'.
If the dual is indeed a marked form of the plural, i.e. a plural with limited
membership, then the so-called 'loss of the dual' is not so much a loss as a change
from an obligatory to an optional category.
Contrary to those who, like Jespersen (1924: 206), welcome the loss of so-
called 'superfluous distinctions', Humboldt admired and appreciated the dual
as he knew it in Greek, because it 'sich schon in die Angemessenheit der Rede-
fiigung einpasst, indem er die gegenseitigen Beziehungen der Worter auf einan-
der vermehrt, auch fur sich den lebendigen Eindruck der Sprache erhoht, und
in der philosophischen Erorterung der Scharfe und Kiirze der Verstandigung zu
Hiilfe kommet...' (Humboldt 1963: 143). But a writer like Pater Schmidt
associated it with nomadic cattle-raising cultures (Schmidt 1926: 326), and
Wackernagel attributed its loss in Greek to the rapid cultural development of
the Greeks in Asia Minor ('die geistig am raschesten entwickelten, am friihes-
ten modern gewordenen Griechen') (1950-7: 1.77). These contradictory and
obviously subjective views have only this core in common: that the absorption
of the dual into the plural occurred first among peoples who were in lively
contact with their neighbors through trade and conquest. We must recall that
when writers like Meillet speak of 'le progres de la civilisation', they are thinking
entirely in terms of western urbanization and modernization. But sociologically
such societies are the foci of populations which influence one another and tend
to break down grammatical categories that are built into the morphology.
That Iceland was one of the last countries in Europe to give up the dual is
therefore not so much a mark of inferior civilization, as of the lack of urban
centers in the Middle Ages and far into the modern period. Tesniere went to
Slovenia to study the dual because he had learned from Meillet and Cuny that

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

it was 'un anachronisme frappant a voir un peuple intelligent et civilisd employer

jusq'en plein XXe siecle une categorie qui passe pour etre l'indice d'une civilisa-
tion en retard' (Tesniere 1925: IX). (Roman Jakobson has reported to me that
in France Tesniere's book enjoyed a short run as a best-seller because the French
public thought it was about duelling in Slovenia!) And indeed he found that the
Slovenes were often quite confused about the use of the dual. Hammerich found
that Eskimo speakers who had been in contact with Europeans had reduced their
use of the dual (Hammerich 1959: 16). Contact diffuses culture and language at
the same time, and the usage of pronominal address is peculiarly sensitive to
contact influence. When Cuny therefore declared that 'le duel est le produit
d'un etat inferieur de la civilisation' and its disappearance with the growth of
culture Vest un fait universel, un fait d'ordre humain' (Cuny 1906: 5) we may
see in these statements merely an expression of the arrogance of urban man in
relation to the quieter, more undisturbed ways of the rural speaker.
For in fact the dual is not lost. It is merely that step by step it has been trans-
formed, at least in Indo-European, from an obligatory morphological category
in nouns and by congruence in verbs, first to a paradigmatic status in the pro-
nouns of the Old Germanic languages, and then to a completely lexical status in
the modern Germanic languages. The paradigm of singular-dual-plural still
exists in the series 'one-both-all' just as it did in 'ek-vit-ver'. We cannot in
English say 'AH his eyes are blue'; and to say 'All his brothers are older than he'
is to say that he has at least three brothers. The same is true in the Scandinavian
languages generally; in French one has to combine 'all' with 'two' to say 'both',
as in the phrase tous les deux. In a universal, generative semantics we would have
to say that in English the dual is still a semantic category. In addition to 'both'
there are many such words as pair, couple, deuce, parents, twins which are dual;
and there are conjunctions like either and whether, as well as the comparative
form of the adjective, which implies two members. In Icelandic there are words
like fedgar and madgur. (In Norwegian begge has to be extended with a noun or
numeral, usually to, so that in Ibsen's Et Dukkehjetn, Nora's husband Torvald
Helmer, in his joy at being saved from Krogstad's threats, says, 'Vi er frelste
begge to, bade du og jeg.')
Contact among peoples has therefore promoted a gradual lexicalization of the
dual, as it has of the case endings (by extending the use of prepositions) or of
verb endings (by the use of auxiliaries). I believe that the author has here mis-
understood Brugmann's and Kluge's argument about the importance of such
phrases as vit bddir in promoting the loss of the dual category (Brugmann 1911:
446; Kluge 1913: 219). Brugmann is merely saying that the existence of lexical
replacements of the dual (like 'both' and 'two')'erleichterte das Aufgeben des
Duals als einer besondern Numerusform'; he does not say that it caused the
change. There is no such thing as a necessary morphological category, and even
such apparently indispensable forms as tense, gender, number, or person can

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
all be expressed in other ways than by suffixes. There is a general trend in the
highly expansive Indo-European languages toward the replacement of suffixes
by form words, but it is neither inevitable nor irreversible, as is shown by the
growth of such forms as the suffixed definite article and reflexive verbs in Scandi-
navian. To say with Gauthiot that the loss of the dual is due to a transition from
'concrete' to 'abstract' thinking (Gauthiot 1912) is hardly adequate. I suggest
rather that as the system of numbers became more important in a trading culture,
the special position of the dual as a marker of coupling lost significance. Counting
became more important than coupling (see Tylden's speculations in 1956:
84-9)-
It is therefore not surprising that Icelandic should lose the formal expression
of the dual in the transition from medieval to modern times. The distinction
was not built into the suffix system which Icelandic did manage to preserve.
Contrary to other morphological distinctions this one was isolated in the system
and hence vulnerable to change. It was in concord with plural verbs, adjectives,
and nouns, not dual, and it did not even extend to the third personal pronouns.
As in ancient Greek, there was considerable semantic overlapping of plural and
dual, as Helgi has shown.
Chapter 2 is devoted to the author's survey of previous writers' conclusions
concerning the dual and Chapter 3 to his own proposal for an improved,
systematic method of studying the problem. He then embarks on a full-scale
study of the (semantic) category of number in the first and second personal
pronouns and their possessives. Since the change he is studying is a semantic
shift within that system, it is commendable that he keeps the entire system before
us and shows us the structure changing as a whole. He sets up a series of six
stages, with some intermediate varieties, as models to account for the entire
development from the earliest Old Norse to the latest modern Icelandic. I find
his diagrams visually helpful, since they enable us to follow the shift feature by
feature: whenever a change occurs, a new state comes into being. What was most
interesting to me was the fact that even in the earliest datable texts we have, the
skaldic poems, the plural is used with singular meaning both in the first person
(the skald speaking of himself) and the second person (the skald addressing the
king). Our author is of two minds concerning the origin of this usage, whether
it is 'a part of poetic style at a very early date' or 'due to influence from Central
or Southern Europe' at the courts which the skalds frequented (p. 60). In view
of the well-known rise of the status plural in the Roman Empire of the fourth
and fifth centuries, I am inclined to suspect the latter (Slotty 1927; Zilliacus

It is a paradox of the word 'we' that although it is construed as a plural, and

refers to more than one person, it is not a plural of T . It always refers to T plus
those others for whom T is speaking.
The basis for applying the plural of the personal pronouns to individual

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

persons is the ambiguity that is inherent in their so-called plurality. Since

people rarely speak in chorus, 'we' does not refer to several speakers, but to the
speaker plus whomever he chooses to include. In Benveniste's term, 'we' is
a '"je" dilate.. .une personne amplifide et diffuse' (1966: 235). When a person
speaks on behalf of a well-defined group, say his family or his followers, his
'we' has been called 'sociative' (Slotty 1927), but a better word might be 'col-
lective', as used by Zilliacus: 'Der Ichbegriff des Singulars ist autark, derjenige
des Plurals wiederum kollektiv' (Zilliacus 1953: 9). The appeal to a collectivity
may have many purposes, from modesty and evasion of responsibility to self-
assertion and assumption of responsibility. The right of a chief to speak on
behalf of his followers is part of his chieftaincy, so long as he is speaking about
collective affairs; but the change from collective to status usage occurs when he
identifies himself with his office and expects to give and receive plural pronouns
or titles in reference also to his purely private affairs. The fact that no examples
of plural usage are offered from either the Eddie poetry or from Old English or
Old High German poetry makes the idea of a native tradition questionable.
Skaldic poetry grew up at the Norwegian courts where a King Olafr could
baptize his son 'Magnus' in imitation of the Frankish Charlemagne. In any
case the practice is not systematized until the development of medieval courtoisie
at the court of King Hakon Hakonsson, where the King's Mirror was written,
in which we are thoroughly informed of the etiquette of the times. It is clear
that in this respect the Roman Church continued the traditions of the Roman
Empire and spread them throughout its domain.
The study of honorific pronouns has a long history, and our author is well
informed on past scholarship, at least in Europe. If I miss anything in this
account, it is a greater perception of their social dimension. He mentions only
one of the many articles that have made the topic of modes of address one of the
exciting new areas of research in sociolinguistics. He is aware of Brown and
Gilman's article on 'The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity', in which they
showed the close association of the personal pronouns with 'two dimensions
fundamental to the analysis of all social life - the dimensions of power and
solidarity' (Brown & Gilman i960: 253). But he does not refer to Brown &
Ford's (1961) extension of this principle to American address, where it turns
out that the choice of first name vs. title plus last name has many of the same social
dimensions as pronoun usage in those languages which have not like English
merged the singular and plural pronouns. In this study they have replaced the
words 'power' and 'solidarity' with 'status' and 'intimacy'. Brown and Ford have
worked out a graphic chart to show the deferential, condescending, and equality
dimensions, and this is further developed by Susan Ervin-Tripp (1969) into a
series of flow charts which show the possible choices and the kinds of social
relations that determine one's choice in a given society. Paul Friedrich's (1966)
work on the pronouns of Russian in the literature of the nineteenth century has

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
led 'to the inference of a relational system of positional slots in the status system,
and of other culturally specific categories' (Friedrich 1966: 252). Another
European nineteenth-century usage, that of Yiddish, is described by Dan
Slobin (1963). To go a little farther afield, the study of linguistic etiquette in
Java by Clifford Geertz (i960) shows how honorific usage is built on a natural
base and is correlated with the stratification of society. This is a chapter in his
book on The Religion of Java, but it is reprinted for general readers in Fishman's
Readings in the Sociology of Language (1968). Another source of such material
is Dell Hymes' reader Language in Culture and Society (1964), especially p. 221-7,
where Evans-Pritchard writes on modes of address in Nuer, an African language,
because 'names and titles of address... symbolize a man's social position in
relation to the people around him' (Hymes 1964: 221). Hymes also published
Samuel Martin's (1964) insightful article on speech levels in Japan and Korea.
While recognizing that much of this discussion is beyond the scope established
by the author for his study, it does seem to me that his work would have won greater
depth and significance if he had come to grips with the problem of what 'honorific'
really means. He even uses a term 'moderately honorific', which I find quite un-
supported. His only reference to the nowgenerally recognized relationship between
class and the honorific pronoun is based on Finkenstaedt's excellent analysis of
the English development (1963), which he cites in connection with the Icelandic
seventeenth-century criticism of farmhands who not only wanted to become
farmers and have nice clothes, but wanted to be addressed as per (ad perast).
These quotations do indeed suggest, as he cautiously puts it, that per was being
increasingly used during the seventeenth century. But they are left unsupported
by any discussion concerning the historical and social events of that period, which
might make us understand what if any social changes were going on to make
honorific per familiar to everyone. As I recall my history, the seventeenth century
was a period of economic and political hardship in Iceland; it was one in which
Danish rule was particularly harsh, and one when the Icelandic people came
closest to losing its independence for good (Gjerset 1925: 317 ff.). In a country
which previously had had no class structure, only a kin structure, there was now
established a hierarchical society which corresponded more closely to that which
the rest of Europe had developed by the end of Middle Ages. The use of non-
reciprocal pronouns (i.e. downward pti, upward per) was a standard feature of a
class-layered society. This was expressed in 1655 by the famous English divine,
Thomas Fuller, who was court chaplain to King Charles II, in rejecting Quaker
usage: ' . . .We maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a
sign of command; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity;
but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of
clownishness; if from affectation, a tang of contempt' (Finkenstaedt 1963: 203).
The reaction in England began with the Quakers, but they chose the wrong
w a y - t o level down; the English people chose to level everyone up, at least in

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

pronominal usage. While Finkenstaedt showed the importance of the Toleration

Act of 1689 and the philosophy of John Locke in the development of the English
pronoun, we do not get a clear picture of the Icelandic seventeenth century that
would enable us to understand why this century should see the firm establishment
of the plural pronoun in honorific sense and the consequent draining of the dual
meaning. The topic is ideally suited for treatment from a sociolinguistic point
of view, under the definition of sociolinguistics established by William Bright
in 1966 as the study of socially conditioned variation in language (Bright 1966:
11). In this case it is the variation in the use of pu, pit, and per to mean 'you'
and ek, vit, and ver to mean 'I'.
One of the puzzling aspects of the variation between 'plain' (which I prefer
to 'ordinary') and 'honorific' pronouns in our author's Stage 3 (the sagas)
is its lack of obvious motivation. Helgi has discussed this problem in great detail
and has advanced much interesting material from the sources. I have merely
.checked over some of the major conversations in Egil's Saga and Njdl's Saga
and found his observations confirmed. Subjects who speak to kings shift from
per to pu even within one sentence (e.g. J>6r61fr to King Haraldr: 'Er hitt been
mfn ok vili, at per, konungr, fari5 at heimboSi til mfn og heyrid pi or5 peira
manna, er^ii truir...' Egil's Saga 40.12). It is true, as Helgi says, that Hrutr
addresses Queen Gunnhildr as per and she him as pi, but he does not mention
that when Hrutr leaves for Iceland after having been her lover, he has exchanged
the per for pu (Brennu-Njdl's Saga 20.26: 'Marga gJ9f g65a hefi ek af J>6r Jjegit').
In Brown and Gilman's terms, a non-reciprocal power semantic has been replaced
by a reciprocal solidarity! Since Icelanders left Norway to escape the royal
power, one wonders why they would carry this custom over to Iceland, where
there were no kings. Even in the sagas, however, chiefs occasionally receive the
plural; thus young Hoskuldr, Njal's foster son, starts with per but shifts to pu:
'G65ar J>ykkja mer virSingar y9rar, er per spai9 m6r (in some texts singular:
spasogur pinar),' segir Hoskuldr, 'jrvi at ek veit, at J>u ert forspar ok 61yginn'
{Brennu-Njdl's Saga 237.2).
As Helgi points out, this is typical of medieval European usage generally
(p. 56); his explanation resorts to a phenomenon described by Paul Kiparsky
(1968) under the name of 'conjunction reduction', originally applied to the
dropping of sentence elements by the use of conjunctions, as in 'John and George
and Christopher came to my house'. Kiparsky extended the term to the puzzling
alternation of preterite and present in narrative passages in older writings, such
as the sagas. Since conjunctions are not involved here, I find the term unfortunate,
though the idea is appealing enough. We are here speaking rather of a rule of
concord: just as successive adjectives modifying a noun must agree in case,
number, and gender with the noun, so we expect successive verbs referring to
the same event to have the same tense. But in narrative the concord rule is
superfluous, since narrative normally deals with the past, and so one is permitted

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
to vary the tense freely from a marked to an unmarked form. I would here place
much greater emphasis on the general logical and linguistic concept of marking
than Helgi does. He merely cites it from Kiparsky as a possible explanation of
the alternation of pit and per (p. 58). I find this a classic case for the application
of marking theory, which is here an expression of the more general concept of
redundancy reduction. Having established that the addressee is of higher status
by using per, the speaker is free to slip back to the basic pi, which is a general
and unmarked form of address, covering all possible situations except the ones
that call for special marking (on marked and unmarked see Jakobson (1964)). It
may be worth noting that the consistent application of sociolinguistic concord
rules of this type requires considerable practice and training. Teachers of
rhetoric in American schools are constantly having to correct narrative tenses
from the present into the past in their pupils' work. The invariable repetition
of a tense marker or of a pronominal status marker becomes redundant unless
severe social training has established their necessity. In the case of the pronoun
such training is possible only in a class-divided society. Note that some types of
older and non-standard English require(d) that the negation be repeated with
every verb and quantifier, while in standard English this concord has been
reduced to a single 'not' per sentence (Labov 1972).
In Chapter 4 the author concentrates on the period which he regards as
crucial for the change from dual to plural meaning. He presents an impressive
array of examples from the manuscripts of Icelandic writers born between 1525
and 1733, and tries to seize the change from Stage 3 to 5 over a transitional Stage
4. The movement of meanings is comparable to the well-known push-pull
chain in phonemic systems (Martinet 1955). Just as there must have been
periods and communities where the phonetic realizations of neighboring phon-
emes overlapped, so Helgi tries to show that in the seventeenth century the
honorific and the dual meanings coexisted in such a way that the homonymy oiper
as applying to singular, dual, and plural became intolerable and was solved by
extending the dual into the plural. I note that Hreinn Benediktsson in his article
on Icelandic in Nordisk Kulturleksikon dated the disappearance of the dual to
the fourteenth or fifteenth century, while Helgi herefindsthat it began in Southern
Iceland around 1600, first in the nominative of the second person (vid), spreading
into other forms, cases, and communities over three generations until it was
completed around 1700. As he recognizes, the material available is not wholly
adequate; I would emphasize that in Iceland the written tradition has been so
strong that even the humblest writers could hardly help but know that in
written, i.e. 'correct' Icelandic, vid and pid were really duals, even long after
they had become plurals in speech. I find eloquent testimony to this effect in
the case he describes (p. 80) of Ami Magnusson fra Geitastekk, a sailor who
wrote his autobiography between 1797 and 1801, when the change was sup-
posedly complete. In Chapters 1-4 he used vid in the plural about one-fourth

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

of the time, but in the remaining nine chapters hardly at all. It need not be that
'his style became more solemn', only that while writing he fell under the spell
of the literary tradition. I will not attempt to say anything further about the
Icelandic material, but suggest that the results reflect primarily a change in
written rather than spoken usage. The author says that 'learning may have
influenced some authors (p. 83)', which I find to be an understatement. In-
cidentally, in stating (p. 81) that Jon Arnason's pronominal paradigm in his
1733 Donatus is mixed, I wonder whether this is not merely a misprint, pre-
sumably in Jon's book. The nominative pid stands at the head of a column where
pier obviously should stand; since the vocative in each column and the first
person plural are correctly placed, I suggest that this is a simple case of switching
columns for the nominative of pid and pier.
In Chapter 5 our author comes to grips with the problem of causation.
The causes of linguistic change have long been discussed by linguists, without
agreement on principles that would enable one to predict either the occurrence
or the direction of change. Let me just short-cut this discussion by saying that
any theory of change must include (a) the rise of random variation and (b) the
ordering of social selection. As in biological evolution, language change depends
in the first instance on variations resulting from the fact that every language
learner acquires the language a little differently from every other. But once the
choices are available, the selection of one variant rather than another is quickly
associated with social values. Recent work by Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968)
has brought new data to bear on this problem, showing by actual statistical
investigation how a socially favored variant can spread. Helgi has demonstrated
that a variation had arisen whereby ver and especially per could be synonymous
with ek/vid and pu/piS, i.e. apply to the same persons, though with different
social values. I feel that he has not taken these social values adequately into
account in his theory of change.
I question first of all whether the semantic ambiguity in itself can account for
the change in Icelandic. There is a great deal of ambiguity in most pronominal
systems, and it does not necessarily lead to change. English with its you that
is both singular and plural, nominative and oblique, familiar and distant is the
most infamous example. Yet such forms as yous or you-all, which appear in
textbooks about English, as means of avoiding the ambiguity, are limited to
dialectal usage. For the most part you is quite unambiguous through
context, and it can be made completely so by adding more words. The French
vous and Swedish ni are ambiguously singular or plural, while the German Sie
and the Dano-Norwegian De are ambiguously singular or plural and second
• person or third person. (I have often been in doubt for a moment whether
Norwegian and Danish speakers were addressing me or speaking of someone
else when a sentence starts 'De...'.) While the notion of homonymic conflict
has been adduced ever since Gillieron, the continued existence of innumerable

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
homonyms in every known language means that by itself homonymy is not a
sufficient cause of change.
Since the dual and the honorific plural had existed side by side at least since
the ninth century, one wonders why they should postpone their deadly conflict
to the seventeenth century, or nearly a millennium. Helgi is no doubt right in
dismissing the development of phrases like vit bddir as a causal factor, but neither
did they (as Gauthiot believed) help to keep it alive. In the fairly numerous
occurrences in the sagas of vit with bddir, it is true that the duality of the latter
is redundant; in context it is rather an emphatic reinforcement, as when Egil's
daughter I>orger9r talks her father into letting her join him on his supposed
deathbed: 'Vil ek, at vit farim eina Iei5 baeQi.' {Egil's Saga 244.21).
It is not always made entirely clear that we are in fact dealing with two pheno-
mena which culturally are in a kind of complementary distribution: the dual is
characteristic of unsophisticated societies, while the honorific is characteristic
of sophisticated societies. As one retreats, the other advances. Neither pheno-
menon needs to be connected, but in Iceland they have in fact been connected,
as is shown by the special development of the dual into a plural. Because of
Iceland's remoteness and late development of sophisticated class structures and
organs of government, the dual remained beyond its time into a period where the
two overlapped, thereby making the dual forms available for plural meaning.
It is one of the theses advanced by Labov and others, and for which there is a
great deal of empirical evidence, that a strong factor in linguistic change is the
attachment of social values to certain forms. I return to the notion that there
must have been something special about the seventeenth century in Iceland to
make ver and per unusable as plurals. These usages had existed side by side
peaceably for centuries, but now a major shift occurs. There is no mention in
this dissertation of the well-known fact that in this century most literate Ice-
landers also became literate for the first time in Danish. Icelandic continued in
full use in speech and writing, but the administration used Danish and taught
Danish in its schools. Danish had a fully developed and class-oriented system of
non-reciprocal power semantic in which the pural was also honorific: first
person vijosjvor; second person Ijederjeders. The forms corresponded rather
exactly with the native Icelandic verjossjvor, perjydur/ydar, especially after the
loss of inflection in the possessive pronoun just before this time (p. 66). The
Danish forms would seem more dignified and elevated because they were used
by and to the rulers of the country, and this could easily be transferred to the
native usage by a simple semantic shift, for which the speakers were already
prepared by the old courtly usage of the plural. This left the already ambiguous
dual forms to develop into plurals, since they were distinctly and clearly different
from the Danish honorifics.
There is nothing surprising about such a development since the whole custom
of honorific usage is well known to have spread via bilinguals from Rome north-

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

wards. Finkenstaedt has shown how the honorific use of you in English arose
among bilingual Anglo-Normans, who simply transferred their own use of
vous into the dominated language. In Denmark the use of honorific second
person plural began giving way to the German custom of third person plural
about 1700, according to Skautrup (1953: 37), but for this there was happily
no basis in Iceland.- Oscar Jones in his investigation of modern Icelandic prono-
minal usage took it as axiomatic that Danish influence lay behind the Icelandic
honorific (Jones 1965: 246). He offered no proof, and I think Helgi has shown
that one cannot take it for granted: Icelandic had the plural honorific available
well before Danish influence set in. But what Icelandic did not have was a
class-oriented usage according to which some people were always addressed
by honorifics even when they were not exercising their authority. This was a
new rule, which I have described above as a rule of concord, which only the
establishment of fixed class distinctions could enforce. This is the rule that
came to Iceland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the Reformation
and the new Danish administration.
The special feature of Icelandic life which makes it possible to link these two
socially motivated changes was therefore the survival of the dual in a remote
society on the fringes of Europe long enough for the honorific to coexist with it
in a stratified society. I am therefore inclined to side with Thomas Finkenstaedt
in his study of English you and thou to place the emphasis primarily on the social
backgrounds and not on the internal structural relations of the linguistic units
(Finkenstaedt 1963: 251). The series of examples presented from English,
Danish, Spanish, Basque, and Uighur are most interesting for the changes they
show, but they hardly prove that plurals used as honorifics must change, in
view of the fact that French and English have now remained stable for at least
two centuries with an ambiguous plural. They prove rather that pronominal
systems are sensitive to social revolutions.
In Chapter 7 the author shows that similar developments took place in the
spoken dialects of German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Faroese. In each of these
the advancing honorific caught up with the dying dual in time to keep the latter
alive as a plain plural. The six cases adduced are earlier than the Icelandic and
therefore less well attested, but the demonstration of their similar results make
them almost like a Q.E.D. for the author. This would have been even more
impressive had he also investigated the non-Germanic cases of the same, some of
which he lists (p. 94, fn. 2), though he does not say explicitly that such important
languages as Czech, Latvian, and Lithuanian are among them.
Too little is known of the Dalecarlian and Faroese developments to offer
much independent evidence. The author's explanation of the German develop-
ment is founded on known facts about the use of the honorific in Germany in
the thirteenth century and seems more appealing than Kranzmayer's purely
phonological explanation. The best-documented case is that of Norwegian, but

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
it is also much harder to analyze than the Icelandic one, where society was
allowed to remain undisturbed so much longer. Let me suggest some points of
interest, which may be offered as a supplement to the author's entirely convincing
presentation.
It must be recalled perhaps more strongly than the author does that in our
earliest sources there were no significant differences between Old Icelandic and
Old Norwegian. The practices described in Stages 1-3 were also Norwegian
and were in fact exported from Norway to Iceland at the time of the landndm.
But by 1350 Norwegian had not only added a p to it and er (as had Icelandic;
it is an error on p. 120 to list the forms it and er for Norwegian; see Tylden 1956:
9-21); Norwegian had also developed first person forms with m (mit, mer by
assimilation with the preceding -um of the verbs), and soon after analogical
forms of the oblique with initial p from the nominative. The Norwegian system
from which we must therefore derive the modern dialectal forms is this:
Number
Singular Dual Plural
Plain ek/mik,
Social t>u/]?ik
relationship mit/okkr, mer/oss,
TT c . , )>ik/)?ykkr per/pydr
Honorific mer/oss, ' '"
per/pydr
This fourteenth-century system included a dual which took over plural
meanings by 1400, and these could then be used as honorifics as well. The
existence of two sets of pronouns, each with a nominative and an oblique form,
led to a complex dialectological picture. In the oblique (object) form of the
second person plural, most of the country has forms reflecting Pykkr (Icelandic
ykkr), the old dual; only in the southeast, with Oslo as a center of influence,
do we find reflections of per or pydr, the old plural. Only in a small southern
area is the vowel y preserved; elsewhere it is either itaicized (dikk, dekk etc.), or
analogically reshaped with 0 from the first person (okkr). In a central area (North
Gudbrandsdal, adjacent parts of Sunnmere and Trondelag) the dokk(e) has
extended into the nominative along with the oss of the first person, obliterating
the distinction of case. The nominative first person me which spans much of
western Norway can derive from either the dual or the plural (mit, me'r), but in
most of Eastern and Northern Norway, plus parts of the northwestern fjords,
vi has replaced me, and the plural oss has eliminated the dual okkr except in a
small south-coast area. No complete study of the resulting systems has been
made, but one may find further details about the overlapping of these areas in
Christiansen (1946-8: 213; 1956: 177).
The Norwegian development involves confusing details, e.g. documents from
the fourteenth century which show /w-forms where only u-forms exist today

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 LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

(Per Grotvedt 1954 is a source omitted by our author that would have been
useful to him). In general I am inclined to envisage the first stage of the develop-
ment as parallel to Icelandic, since some of the geographically closest dialects of
SW Norway are also most similar to Icelandic on this point. But the later stages
illustrate a strong analogical reshaping of the first and second personal pronouns
after each other, as noted for Indo-European by Brugmann (1911: 386-9).
But beyond that the system showed its sensitivity to social influence by accept-
ing after 1400 the fashionable forms vi/oss and I/eder from Swedish and Danish.
Tylden was undoubtedly right in deriving these from outside influence, con-
trary to Seip's attempt to derive them phonologically (Seip 1956: 12-13); but
his conclusion that they came from the written forms of the Danish government
I consider wrong. They were rather part of the urban influence that issued from
Oslo into Eastern Norway, from Bergen into the NW fjords and Northern Nor-
way, and from Trondheim to the coastal areas of Trondelag. These were all
trading areas in close contact with the respective cities, which was not true of the
me-region in the west or the OM-region in the Dovre mountains. If we accept
Helgi's thesis and agree that the fourteenth century was the period when the use
of deferential per expanded in Norway, we can find more than enough historical
evidence to buttress this as a period of dawning bureaucracy and class distinction.
According to the historian Edvard Bull, this was the century when the feudal
lords 'constantly gain greater power upwards, in relation to the king, and down-
wards, in relation to the people', and a new urban middle class came into being,
described as 'the lower nobility' (Bull 1968: 116). It was also a period of economic
disaster for the Norwegian people after the Black Death, the foundation of its
absorption into the Swedish and eventually the Danish kingdom, and the century
in which the Hanseatic League established its dominion over Norwegian com-
merce.
Finally, let me sum up the results of our investigation of Helgi GuSmundsson's
research. The topic he has chosen to investigate is one that has never been
thoroughly studied, in spite of its great value as a parade example of linguistic
change. In spite of some critical remarks, I have myself learned a great deal by
working my way through his book. In treating the topic he has done an enormous
amount of research, both in Icelandic sources and in the general literature on
pronominal systems. He has shown distinct mastery in the form and presentation
of his material, close familiarity with the linguistic problems involved, and a
keen sense of the limitations on all historical data in proving causality in lin-
guistic change. I have put my finger on a number of points where I think he
has stopped short of a complete view of the problems involved. I feel that his
conception of the problem is too self-containedly linguistic and that he has not
done justice to the sociological and historical settings of the change he has
described. I do not feel that he has proved a causal connection between the
pernicious homonomy of plural and honorific, but that given the gradual dis-

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 PRONOMINAL ADDRESS IN ICELANDIC
appearance of the dual in a sophisticated society, he has shown good reason for
the particular solution adopted in Icelandic and other Germanic dialects: the
overlap of the receding dual with the advancing honorific resulting in the assign-
ment of a new meaning to the dual and the isolation of the honorific.
It is evidence of the care with which the dissertation has been prepared that it
is virtually free of misprints: Finkenstaedt's dissertation in the bibliography is
You und Thou (not You and Thou); in the quotation from the Fourth Grammatical
Treatise p. 39 there is some confusion of/and tall s; in the first sentence of 4.1
there should be a comma after 'dual'; p. 94, line 3 var should be war; p. 123,
line 9, formally should be formerly (error in Lockwood's original).

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CORRECTION
Volume 4, Number 1, page 120: Intonation edited by D. Bolinger should be
listed on page 122. The notice following Syntactic theory I edited by F. W.
Householder refers to both the Bolinger and the Householder books.

ANNOUNCEMENT
la monda lingve-problemo would particularly welcome articles written in major
languages other than English. It seeks a balance of not more than half of its
contents in English. The editor is Dr. Richard E. Wood, Dept. of Languages and
International Studies, Adelphi University, Garden City, New York 11530, USA.

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