The purpose of this paper is to test the validity of the oft-repeated proposition that we can not handle meaning linguistically, by attempting to evolve an empirical procedure for the processing of semantic field data, which can then be evaluated in terms of the criteria of consistency, exhaustiveness, and simplicity. This procedure will be applied to a minimum semantic contrast in grammar—the difference in grammatical meaning correlated with the presence or the absence of a single paradigmatic morpheme. I shall call this correlation a GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, and the contrasting morphemic units the GRAMMATICAL FORMS of this category.

[All available morphological and orthographic data are re-examined in support of the theory that the Gothic digraph au designates relatively low back monophthongal values when it occurs in the inflectional syllables. This problem is compared with the closely related problem of ai, and the implications of parallelism in the use of the two digraphs are considered briefly.]

[Application of the diachronic method to a structural study. A discussion of the segmental phonemes of a Dutch dialect introduces a reconstruction of the development of the vowel system, on historical evidence supplemented by an interpretation of distributional peculiarities in the modern dialect. Structural influences of the standard language on the dialect are discussed, and certain future developments are outlined.]

The past three decades have seen a number of monographs and articles on the phonetics of Icelandic, but little has yet been done with its phonemics. A first attempt was made by Kemp Malone in a paper read to the Linguistic Society in 1950, but this was drastically amended in a note he published three years later in LANGUAGE. There is a vigorous dogmatism in Malone's approach to phonemics, unhampered by those ifs and buts which strew the discourse of more cautious scholars. Although he claims to have taken account of phonemic work done since 1923, when he published his Phonology of Modern Icelandic, there are no references to indicate the scope of his reading, and few traces in his work of the ideas advanced by other scholars. His only statement of principle is this: 'I have tried first of all to classify each isolable speech-sound as an allophone of some phoneme.' He provides minimal pairs for each phoneme and a brief statement of its distribution. But we do not learn just how he isolated these speech sounds and overlooked others, or what criteria permitted him to classify the sounds with one phoneme and not another. Neither is there any description of the larger units into which the phonemes enter, or any consideration of alternative analyses such as we have been taught to expect in recent phonemic work. That alternatives are possible becomes apparent in his reconsideration of the prosodic system, which permitted him to reduce the number of phonemes at one blow from 61 to 39. This change suggests that there is room for further consideration of Icelandic phonemics. It will be the purpose of this paper to explore various possible analyses of Modern Icelandic as a contribution to what has been called the 'indeterminacy' of phonemic systems and the ‘convertibility’ of different descriptions. We shall also take up some of the problems involved in finding the structure or structures of a language.