| 1. |
- Óskarsson, Veturliði, 1958-
(författare)
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Loanwords with the prefix be- in Modern Icelandic : An example of halted borrowing
- 2015
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Ingår i: Ord og tunga. - Reykjavik : Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum. - 1022-4610. ; 17, s. 1-26
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Words with the German prefix be- entered Icelandic in the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, mostly from Danish. Nearly 300 words are listed in the Icelandic University Dictionary in Reykjavík. Almost no such words are, however, usable in Icelandic of today. The disappearance of these words from the language can, with some reservation, be seen as an example of a halted borrowing process. The number of new words belonging to this group, that entered Icelandic, fell drastically in the nineteenth century. Words first attested in twentieth century texts are almost all from historical novels and sailor language, and a few words are native Icelandic neologisms, which suggests that even if the prefix never acquired the role of a model for domestic word formation in Icelandic, it may have had some possibilities to take on such a role. Words of this type have been criticized by Icelandic language purists and it has been held for a fact that they were rather frequent in the language in previous centuries. An investigation of a corpus of 1,640 nineteenth century private letters does, however, not suggest that such words were common in the language of lay-people of that century, and neither does a brief comparison with another corpus of nearly 4.5 million pages from 810 magazines and periodicals.
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| 2. |
- Tarsi, Matteo, 1988-
(författare)
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Að halda uppi lögum og reglu : Saga og orðmyndun orðsins lögregla
- 2018
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Ingår i: Ord og tunga. - : The National and University Library of Iceland. - 1022-4610 .- 2547-7218. ; 20, s. 105-120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article deals with the history and word formation of the Icelandic word for ‘police’, i.e. lögregla. The word constitutes an interesting case of word formation in that said lexeme is a dvandva compound whose creation is related to the expression að halda uppi lögum og reglu ‘to maintain law and order’. Moreover, it is argued that the word has arisen in the wake of the Icelandic purist movement in the first half of the 19th century, and that its creator is Konráð Gíslason, who was at the time amember of the Icelandic Literary Society (Hið íslenzka bókmenntafélag) and editor of the journal Fjölnir.According to the sources, the word, lögregla, cannot have been formed as an independent lexical item. In fact, the word appears first in a compound with maður ‘man’, meaning ‘policeman’ or, more precisely, ‘a man who is in charge of maintaininglaw and order’. It is argued that lögregla has in fact been created in order to gradually substitute the Danish loanword pólití, first in compounds such as pólitímaður and pólitíþjónn ‘policeman’, and then as a single lexeme. The Danish loanword pólití had a twofold meaning: ‘policeman’ and ‘police’. Moreover, it is argued that lögregla, as an unbound lexeme, was initially a shortened form for lögreglumaður, and later assumedthe general meaning ‘police force’ by means of synecdoche (pars pro toto).
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| 3. |
- Tarsi, Matteo, 1988-
(författare)
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On the origin of the oldest borrowed Christian terminology in Icelandic
- 2016
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Ingår i: Ord og tunga. - : The National and University Library of Iceland. - 1022-4610 .- 2547-7218. ; 18, s. 85-101
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article deals with the origin of the oldest core of borrowed Christian terminology still extant in Icelandic, i.e. those words which were introduced in Old Norse in the period ranging from the first evangelical missions in Scandinavia (9th c.) to the establishment of the archbishopric in Niðarós (1153).After a short introduction (1), a brief overview of the aforementioned historical period is given (2). The corpus, which consists of 45 words, is subsequently presented alongside its semantic classification (3), of which a chronological (text-based) reading is given. In the next section (4), particular attention is drawn to a sample of ten words, which have been chosen for their importance both from a historico-linguistic and etymological perspective. Special emphasis will be placed on addressing the role of Old Saxon in the dawn of Christianity in Scandinavia and Iceland and on revising some of the etymologies proposed by the three major Icelandic etymological dictionaries (AeW, IeW and ÍOb). In the last paragraph (5), it will be stressed that a methodology which rests upon historical, alongside linguistic and philological, facts is needed if one wants to better understand the cultural and linguistical background of a particular portion of the lexicon: here, the oldest part of the Christian borrowed lexicon is analysed as a particularly interesting example.
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