Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 30

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Orð og tunga
How exactly such words were eliminated is, on the other hand, a sub-
ject that needs further investigation and will not be dealt with here.
What I find more interesting at present is to get some picture of the
usability of the be-/bí-words in the Icelandic speech community of the
nineteenth century; which words were the ones that were common in
that century, shortly before the two professors' statements? Who used
them? Wlaat kind of language was criticized? Where were the be-/bí-
words most prominent? — Or: Were they perhaps not at all usual in
everyday language?
The fact that OH in Reykjavík lists almost 300 be- and bí- lexemes
does not help much when such questions are asked. Behind these are
only a little more than 1,000 excerpted examples, very often only one
or two for each word, and this says, of course, nothing at all about the
text frequency of such words. But what is interesting, all the same, is
that between 30% and 40% of the excerpted examples are from official
texts, charters, legal documents, formal letters from officials such as
bishops and solicitors etc., and some 10% are from historical novels
from the twentieth century. A substantial number of the excerpts are
thus from texts that do not reflect the language and language-use of
common people, and many of the remaining examples also belong to
formal texts or to a higher register, rather than to everyday language.
Of course, lexicographers make use of those texts that are avail-
able, and official texts, charters, legal documents etc. constitute a big-
ger part of both the edited and the unedited Icelandic text material
from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century than do everyday texts by
common people. Nonetheless, the picture is rather clear: More than
half of the examples are either from official texts or from twentieth-
century historical novels, and that certainly does not suggest that the
be-/bí-words were a part of everyday language.
In the project "Language Change and Linguistic Variation in 19th-
Century Icelandic and the Emergence of a National Standard", in
which the present author is participating, we have in addition to other
material access to a fairly large collection of unpublished nineteenth-
century private letters from common people (not necessarily people
from the lower classes). In all there are 1,640 letters from 348 people
(122 women and 226 men), containing somewhere around 916,000
running words (Haraldur Bernharðsson 2013, fact sheet, and private
communication). Most of the letters are from c. 1820-1900 (in all 89%);
some 11% (177 letters) were from the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, from 1900 up and until 1937. Ahandful of letters are written later