¹ Work on this project was supported by the Office of Scientific and Scholarly Research of the University of Oregon Graduate School.

² Marie Bjerrum, ‘An outline of the Faroe vowel system’, Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague 5.235–43 (1949); Bjerrum, ‘Forsøg til en analyse af det færøskeudtrykssystem’, Acta philologica scandinavica 25.31–69 (1960); Kenneth G. Chapman, Icelandic-Norwegian linguistic relationships — Norsk tidsskrift for sprogvidenskap, suppl. bind 7.131–4 (1962); Jørgen Rischel, ‘Om retskrivningen og udtalen i moderne færøsk’ in Føroysk-donsk orðabók² xiii-xxxvi (Tórshavn, 1961). Bjerrum (1949) is rather severely criticized in Hockett's review of the Travaux, HAL 18.92–4 (1952).

³ In addition to the works cited in fn. 2, there are a number of thorough treatments of Faroese phonology: V. U. Hammershaimb, Færøsk anthologi 1.lvii-lxxi (K0benhavn, 1891); Jakob Jakobsen (with the assistance of Vilhelm Thomsen and Otto Jespersen) in Fæxrøsk anthologi 1.439–60; Jakobsen, Færøsk anthologi 2 (København, 1891)—this volume being a glossary to the first with every vocabulary item transcribed phonetically; M. A. Jacobsen and Christian Matras, Føroysk-donsk orðabók¹ (Tórshavn, 1927–8); Christian Matras, Appendix to Føroysk-donsk orðabók¹ (Tórshavn, 1930); W. B. Lockwood, An introduction to Modern Faroese (København, 1955).

⁴ Noam Chomsky and George A. Miller, ‘Introduction to the formal analysis of natural languages’ in Luce et al., Handbook of mathematical psychology 2.310–3 (New York, 1963).

⁵ The approach here followed is generally that of Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky in many published works. Alpha-rules, employed in the rules of this paper, were (I believe) first used in phonological statements by T. G. Bever of MIT.

⁶ These are the phones of the central dialect of Faroese; see my ‘Dialects of Modern Faroese: A preliminary report’, Orbis 12.393–7 (1963). I have excluded from consideration here the reduced vowels /i u a/ and the diphthongs /ui ei ai oi/. The former set is a problem unto itself, which can however be easily handled within the framework of the present paper. The diphthongs are excluded because they offer no particular problems. Yet it is interesting to note that in syllables closed by long consonants or long liquids the offglides are extremely short and often disappear entirely. The following forms (infinitives and third person singular past for the verbs involved) adequately illustrate this : [svaipa] : [sva(i)p:ti] ‘envelope’; ‘try’; [tuima] : [tu(i)m:di] ‘like’; [čceipa] : [čce(i)p:ti] ‘buy’. This situation can of course be handled with a very simple deletion rule, which would have no effect on the other diphthongal phones since these do not occur in the same types of syllables. In the table and in all of the phonetic citations made in the course of this paper, the macron is used to indicate both tenseness and length of the vowel over which it occurs.

⁷ I enclose morphophonemes and all other theoretical phonological representations, but not the final phonetic one, in slant lines.

⁸ There is no good reason for restricting the examples to verb forms; these merely present a neat set for discussion. In fact one of the important features of the rules is that they operate throughout the Faroese phonological system; cf. [šïp] : [šip:s] ‘ship’ (nominative and genitive singular); and the various forms of ‘few’ : , etc.

⁹ The matrix includes only features necessary to distinguish the vowels from one another. All of these segments will be understood to be + vocalic, — consonantal, — obstruent, — strident, — nasal, + continuant, + voiced. Length and tenseness are covered (for vowels) in the feature ‘tense’ : all long vowels are tense, all short vowels lax. The matrix approaches minimal redundancy in its specification of the vowel morphophonemes : it contains only 31 specifications to distinguish the 9 segments, or 3.44 specifications per segment. The elimination of all redundancy would require log2 9 specifications per segment or 3.17.

¹⁰ In the rules dif = diffuse, cmp = compact, flt = flat, grv = grave, tns = tense, ens = consonantal, lng = long.

¹¹ James D. McCawley, ‘The morphophonemics of the Finnish noun’ (1964, unpublished).