Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 103

Learned & Popular Etymology
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and coherent entities (which is, of course, one of the definitions of a
morpheme). If this language is then exposed to the influx of polysyllabic
loanwords, processes of phonetic adaption may bring them into line
with native phonology without overcoming the monosyllabic constraint
on morphemes, and native speakers may continue (for a time) to try
to read complete morphemes into the new non-morphemic syllables.
Of course, this formulation assumes that speakers have recourse to
morphemic analysis in normal language use, which is by no means
given.
2.1 Icelandic
Icelandic is in many ways an example of such a language. Like Old
English, it consists mainly of monosyllabic morphemes. Unlike Eng-
lish, however, Icelandic retains vowel-quality in unstressed syllables
(which are usually more or less bound structural morphemes).2 Ice-
landic morphemic structure has thus remained largely explicit, so that
the majority of Icelandic compounds retain the identity of their com-
ponents. This is even true of most Icelandic placenames, in contrast to
the rest of Scandinavia and England. More strikingly, the vocabulary
of Icelandic remained essentially that of a pre-technological farming
and fishing culture until the British and American occupation during
the Second World War, when the Icelandic industrial revolution ran to-
gether with the advent of post-war technology. Thus modem Icelandic
has very few polysyllabic morphemes, all of them loans, and Icelandic
word-formation consists to this day largely of native processes such as
stem-compounding and systematic morphological adaption.
But in spite of this relative lack of exposure to loans, which may have
created a certain reluctance towards them, Icelandic does not show them
significant intolerance in practice. A few polysyllabic morphemes have
in fact existed in Icelandic from earliest times, chiefly the handful of
Latin ecclesiastical terms exemplified by ábóti ‘abbot’ and the very
small number of Irish loans. Middle English loans such as lávarður
2 See Pétur Helgason (1993:53-68) for evidence of a certain degree of centralisation
tn unstressed modem Icelandic vowels.