Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 112

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Pétur Knútsson
ple is the neuter noun gistur, literally ‘temporary lodging’, which was
recorded in the first edition of the Icelandic lexicon of terms for the
computer for the term register ‘temporary holding-point for data during
computation’ (Tölvuorðasafn 1983:21). At first sight the word appears
to be a slightly unusual—although not unacceptable—formation frorn
the the verb gista ‘to stay ovemight’, but a cross-reference to an alter-
native form registur (Tölvuorðasafn 1983:27) betrays its provenance.
In the second edition of the lexicon (Tölvuorðasafn 1986:52) the word
has been replaced by the neuter noun gisti which is possibly more ac-
ceptable as a formation from the verb, while registur has been dropped;
progressive normalisation has thus obscured the original echo. A sim-
ilar example is sperrt raddglufa, lit. ‘wide-open voice-chink’ which is
used by Icelandic linguists for the phonetic feature ‘spread glottis’ (cf.
Eirflcur Rögnvaldsson 1984:46). Icelandic sperrt ‘cocked, stretched’ is
etymologically unrelated to the English spread\ while the term glufa
‘gap, chink’, which reflects the gl of the English glottis, has been cho-
sen from a number of Icelandic words meaning ‘gap’ such as bil, gap,
op, rauf, some at least as appropriate as glufa.5 Raddglufa (literally
‘voice-chink’) is the generally accepted term for ‘glottis’.
Other, more commonplace coinages, show varying echoic corre-
spondences with their sources. The common term fjárfesting, liter-
ally ‘money-fastening’, was reputedly introduced in the 1940’s by the
politician and economist Gylfi Þ. Gíslason to translate the English term
investment: the middle syllable of the two words are almost identical.
A later coinage is eyðni ‘AIDS’ suggested in 1985 by the writer and
meteorologist Páll Bergþórsson. The term is a formation from the verb
eyða ‘wipe out, lay waste, wear away’, and distinctly echoes its source:
the root vowel is a long /ei/ in both words, while Icelandic ð has a phono-
logical and graphological relationship to d. Interestingly, however, the
echoic nature of the coinage was not mentioned in the newspaper con-
5 Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson suggests that this term originated in a paronomastic
mood during Höskuldur Þráinsson’s classes at the University of Iceland, and an anony-
mous reviewer points out that its echoic nature is probably prompted by the need to
retain the intemational abbreviation for the feature: [±sp.gl.] (private communications).