Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Qupperneq 110

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Pétur Knútsson
side-issue. Even if we can íind an example of adaption that is clearly not
leamed, this does not mean that it is a product of a lack of understanding.
Very often it is deliberate and paronomastic, and thus usually touched
with humour — which is not necessarily the same as Bloomfield’s
“facetiousness”. Thus the name of a famous London public house,
The Elephant and Castle, has been adapted ftom l’Enfant de Castille.
While the Establishment may see this as ignorant misrepresentation of
the mob, the sociolinguist will clearly recognise this brilliant down-
grading of the original name as pointed social comment.
5.2 Peasant stupidity
The ability to assume stupidity as a formative factor in uneducated
speech can lead to surprising conclusions. A good example here is the
Icelandic word variously spelt peysa or peisa ‘ s weater ’, traditionally as-
sumed to have entered the language when 19th-century French sailors
pointed to an Icelander and said Voilá un paysan, which the foolish
peasants interpreted as meaning “That’s a fine sweater you’re wear-
ing”. Surprisingly, this simplistic explanation is still often accepted by
Icelandic scholars: Öm Ólafsson (1991:98) is representative in offering
this word as “the most famous example of misunderstanding resulting
in a loan-word”. The assumption seems to be that the French term was
adopted as a result of a single misunderstanding somewhere in Ice-
land or Icelandic waters — unless the same misunderstanding occurred
spontaneously all over Iceland at about the same time. This incon-
gruous assumption is so tenacious that the new Icelandic Etymological
Dictionary (which is refreshingly free ffom prescriptive attitudes) finds
it necessary to mention that the word peisa (whose origin is admittedly
obscure) is “unlikely to be connected with [tœpast í ætt v/ð] the French
paysan ‘farmer’” (Ásgeir Bl. Magnússon 1989, ‘peisa’).
6. Some echoic examples in Icelandic
Prescriptive etymology is, as we have seen, a relatively recent phe-
nomenon which stems from a basic misunderstanding of the Neogram-
marians’ vision of language change, and as such is quite out of touch