Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 34

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Orð og tunga
Dictionary (OH) list almost 300 different lexemes. The main Icelandic
dictionaries of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries do not suggest
that such words were common; at least the editors of these dictionar-
ies did not find it necessary to include such words, and they are not
used, as far as can be surmised, in Icelandic explanations except in the
Latin-Icelandic dictionary from 1738.
Such words did, however, enter the language and were a part of
its lexicon for centuries, although they were not used particularly
frequently. About 40 of the words registered in OH's collections did
not appear in texts until the nineteenth century, which suggests that
the borrowing process was still in progress in that century. In 1,640
private letters by common people of the nineteenth century, only
eight be-lbí-'words are, however, to be found, and only one of the 40
"new words" appears in the letters. A quick look at a text corpus with
around 4.5 million pages, comprising nineteenth-century magazines
and periodicals, does not indicate that these words were frequent in
such texts either. A closer examination would be required to see the
full picture, but the present study indicates that the often criticized be-
and bi-words were not usual in the vocabulary of common people in
nineteenth-century Iceland even though comments and suggestions
such as those above, taken from Sigurður Nordal, Guðmundur Finn-
bogason and Vilmundur Jónsson, might lead us to believe otherwise.
Exactly how peripheral the words were in the everyday language
of previous centuries is difficult to say, and there is, of course, the pos-
sibility that they (or some such words) were more widely used (and
more usable?) in spoken language than in written texts. Such an as-
sumption would, however, be rather difficult to maintain; why would
the words, then, not appear in informal private letters by people who
have little or no scholarly training in writing, and in many cases no
formal education at all, and probably only a limited knowledge of an
emerging purist language attitude? It is most likely that the majority
of the be-words that entered Icelandic, and are to be found in different
texts from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, never acted as a
part of the active lexicon of daily language. Comments such as those
mentioned above probably target isolated words that because of their
immediately perceived foreignness were easily recognizable and easy
to criticize. Use of such words in historical novels of the twentieth
century to characterize eccentric or odd characters, may also have
made modern Icelanders more ready to believe that they were, or had
been, more usual than they actually were.