Magnus Petursson: Islandisch. Eine Ubersicht iiber die moderne islandische 
Sprache mit einem kurzen Abriss der Geschichte und Literatur Islands. 
Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. 1978. Pp. xii, 220 + map. 
Before the book under review, Magnus Petursson (=MP) had published his 
doctoral dissertation about the articulatory phonetics of Icelandic (1974, in 
French) , a book on general and Icelandic phonetics, and another on general 
and Icelandic phonology (1976, 1978, both in Icelandic) in addition to a nu-
mber of papers connected with phonetics and phonology: MP has now to be 
commended for having tackled a broader subject: Islandisch is an attempt 
at presenting an overall view of Iceland and Icelandic, especially the lat-
ter, to the German-reading public. 
The book is divided into five chapters (each ending with a select bibliogra-
phy in which the works recommended for reading are marked with a cross; 
a complete more-than-300-item bibliography is to be found at the end of 
the book) and an appendix (by· Heinrich Heeger) on Icelandic cartography. 
Enclosed is a fairly large multicoloured map of Iceland. 
261 
The first two chapters of the book are non-linguistic: they discuss Iceland 
and its inhabitants. The basic geographical data about the island are given; 
its landscape, climate, flora and fauna are briefly described. There follcr 
ws a short P?litical history of Iceland, beginning with the landnama (874-
930) and independence (930-1262), continuing with the Norwegian (1262-1380) 
and Danish (1380-1918) domination, and ending with the eras of the perscr 
nal union with Denmark (1918-1944) and of the new independent republic 
(1944-). Also mentioned is the discovery of Greenland and North America 
by Icelanders in the tenth century, as well as emigration from the island 
in more recent times. 
The remaining pages (32-211), the bulk of the book, treat Icelandic, exce- . 
pt that the third chapter contains, in addition to the discussion of the early 
Norwegian settlers 'language, some encyclopaedic information about Icelan-
dic literature. 
Chapter Four describes Standard Modern Icelandic (with some allusion to 
the dialects in the pronunciation section). The presentation is partly contra-
stive, in that the emphasis is in several places on the characteristics of 
Icelandic unlikely to be familiar to the German reader, e.g. on the peculi-
ar syntax of the definite article. Phonetics, morphology, syntax, and lexi.·-
cology are dealt with. There is also an informative section on personal na-
mes. Morphology is the most complicated (and the best investigated) part 
of Icelandic grammar, and has consequently received most· attention in the 
book (pp.76-131). However, at least phonetics, phonology, and syntax wcr 
uld have deserved comparably extensive treatment. True enough, syntaxhas 
so far been lamentably neglected in Icelandic studies, so that MP had a 
less than desirable foundation to build upon; much of what he does descri-
be is typical Icelandic constructions, and these will receive due attention 
from the interested readership (pp.130-140, cf. also pp.106-110 a.nd 116-
119). 
It is unfortunate that phonetics (the pronunciation) is limited to pp. 54-75, 
for MP, a specialist in Icelandic phonetics and phonology, would have been 
eminently suited to present an extensive and reliable picture as well as the 
latest results in these fields. An expansion of the phonetics and phonology 
(and, as far as possible, of syntax; some syntactic work seems to be fort-
hcoming at the tirne of this writing) is advised for the future editions of 
Islandisch. 
The information offered in Chapters 1-4 is useful, important, and it is 
good to have it gathered in one place. However, it draws on the existing 
literature, and a German-reading person could retrieve much of iit from 
German encyclopaedias and from Kress 1963. By contrast, Chapter Five 
262 
(pp.157-188), a forschungsbericht covering the period between 1923 (the publi-
cation year of Noreen, to whose bibliography MP refers the reader for in-
formation on older work) and about 1976, is completely new: there is no 
other such survey of Icelandic written in German, and none of equal scope 
and up-to-dateness written in any other language. The chapter is divided 
in to thematic sections, in which much of the work referred to is accompa-
nied by terse allusions to its contents and/ or by evaluation. The latter (ra-
rely negative) is of course subjective: another author would probably judge 
differently, at least in some cases; in the present era of specialisation 
one scholar cannot be expected to be equally competent in all the fields. 
(Actually it would be the wisest, given ,the ramified state o~celandic lin-
guistics, if such bibliographies raisonnees were composed l:jy suitably be-
lanced author collectives; but the only relatively recent opportunity of this 
kind - the publication in Reykjavfk of f>&ttir um fslenzk mal eftir nokkra 
{slenzka malfraefilnga in 1964 - has been missed. MP• s in the next best 
course of action.) Estimating the importance of the publications by the qua-
ntity of remarks attached to them in Islandisch, one gets the impression 
that MP has a bias towards the work of non-Icelandic authors. The impre-
ssion may be erroneous, and is possibly due to the fact that the contributi-
ons to Icelandic studies of Russian-writing scholars (those contributions are 
collected in toto for the first time - this being yet another service rende-
red by MP) have been allotted relatively much comment, in an effort to 
break the language barrier. In any case, this reviewer wishes to state his 
conviction that nobody ;ha.s furthered Icelandic studies more than Icelanders 
- MP himself being an illustrative example. Another case in point, the 
wealth of bibliographical references to the work of Icelandic scholars would 
be more forceful if the philology were not drastically underrepresented in 
the book. (Thus only three publications by Jon Helgason are mentioned.) 
For instance. text editions contain in their apparatus much material direc-
tly or indirectly relevant to the history of the language and to its grammar. 
A proper selection of the philologica ought to have been included in Chap-
ter Five, possibly in a special section. 
Errors and omissions worth pointing out are, (1) _!! is pronounced as[ oi] 
in laut (p. 54; correct a to au), and (2) in Chapter Five I miss Finnur 
Jonsson 1908, Jakob Joh. Smari 1920 (mentioned in another chapter, on p. 
155), and Hoskuldur Thrainsson 1975. Future editions of the book can and 
must be improved, both in scope and in such detail as just adduced. 
263 
References 
Jonsson, Finnur. Mrufor.Eli {slenskrar tUngu og helstu atriEli sOgu hennar 
{agripi. Copenhagen, 1908. · 
Kress, Bruno. Laut- und Formenlehre des Islandischen. Halle/Saale, 1963. 
Noreen, Adolf. Altislandische und altnorwegische Grammatik (Laut- und 
Flexionslehre) unter Beriicksichtigung des Urnordischen. Fourth edi-
tion. Tul>ingen, 1923. 
Petursson, M~gnus. Les articulations de l' islandais a la lumiere de la 
radiocinematographie. Paris, 197 4. 
DrOg aa almennri og fslenskri hljOElfnt:Eli. Reykjavfk, 1976. 
Drog aa hljoakerfisfr~i. Reykjavfk, 1978. 
Smari, Jakob Joh. fslenzk setningarfnEli. Reykjavfk, 1920. 
Thrainsson, Hoskuldur. Gapping in Icelandic: Functional explanations and 
no-ambiguity condition. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of 
the Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 604-14. 1975. 
Janez Orešnik 
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