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Article published In: NOWELE
Vol. 77:2 (2024) ► pp.145–167

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Contrastive feature hierarchies and Germanic phonology

Jørgen Rischel’s analysis of the Scandinavian runic transformation

ORCiD logo with link | University of Toronto
Published online: 3 December 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/nowele.00088.dre
Abstract
I discuss an analysis of changes in the Scandinavian runic alphabet, or futhark, by Rischel, J. 1966. Phoneme, grapheme, and the “importance” of distinctions: Functional aspects of the Scandinavian runic reform. Interim Report No. 1, Research Group for Quantitative Linguistics, Stockholm, 1–21. Reprinted in Rischel 2009: 254–271.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar. Rischel’s article accounts for some puzzling changes in the futhark by employing contrastive feature hierarchies represented as branching trees. Feature hierarchies can be traced back to the work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues. They enjoyed a brief period of prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, but then disappeared from mainstream phonological theory. However, they were employed in a number of interesting studies of Germanic and other languages whose insights we can still profit from today. The goal of this paper is to bring attention to this largely forgotten approach to phonological analysis, and to spell out the principles that underlie it.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Origins and history of contrastive feature hierarchies, aka “branching trees”
  • 3.Rischel’s analysis of the transformation of the Scandinavian runes
    • 3.1Vowels: The older futhark
    • 3.2Transformation of the vowel runes: The younger futhark
    • 3.3Obstruents: The older futhark
    • 3.4Transformation of the obstruent runes: The younger futhark
    • 3.5Critiques of Rischel’s account of the runic transformation
  • 4.Towards a theory of contrastive feature hierarchies
    • 4.1Criteria for ordering features into a hierarchy
    • 4.2Contrastive Hierarchy Theory
    • 4.3The addition of noncontrastive features: Enhancement
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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