Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Side 114

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Pétur Knútsson
above, as well as established neologisms such as the late medieval
ímynd ‘image’ which seems to echo imago? Semantic extensions of
native terms can also occur in the same way; an example is ás ‘beam,
rafter, ridge’ which the Written Language Archive of the Icelandic In-
stitute of Lexicography (WLA) first records in the sense ‘axis’ in the
nineteenth century.7 8 An early extension of ás to mean ‘axle’ probably
dates from the introduction of wheel technology. While ás and axis are
not related there is cognation between the Latin axis, Old English eaxl
and Old Icelandic öxl ‘shoulder’, and Icelandic öxull ‘axle’ (whence
the English word), and it is clear that the semantic development of
these and allied terms is compounded by the processes of echoism that
we have been discussing, processes which are quite independent of
etymological considerations.
7. Echoic processes
7.1 Morphosyllabicfactors
Having looked at several examples of echoic loans we should retum
briefly to the second motivating factor I suggested at the end of section
3: the existence of a sanction in the language for paronomasia. This
would seem to raise the question of whether paronomasia is a linguistic
universal; but in fact all I wish to suggest is that certain languages may
be structured in ways that encourage or discourage paronomasia.
7 I have not found earlier occurrences of ímynd than in Oddur Gottskálksson’s 1540
Bible translation (Nýja Testamenti Odds Gottskálkssonar)—it is not recorded in Larsen
1891 and does not appear in the Old Icelandic Corpus at the Institute of Linguistics,
University of Iceland. Oddur uses the noun ímynd 7 times: on four occasions (333,
384, 429, 433) for imago, twice (392, 422) for forma, and once (470) for figura:
he also uses the middle voice of the verb ímyndast (406) to translate the passive
formari. Assuming for ease of argument that ímynd is in fact Oddur’s coinage, its
distribution here would illustrate the point that, once established, the echoic neologism
is immediately available for use in other contexts, and is thus not necessarily a conscious
aliusion on the translator’s part.
8 WLA first records ás as a translation of axis in Bjöni Gunnlaugsson (1865:348).
(“Taka menn sér beina línu, lagða helzt í gegnum boglínu miðja, sem þá kallast ás
(axis) einnig abscissulína”). The unconnected form ás ‘heathen god’ was similarly
extended in classical Icelandic to mean ‘the ace (at dice)’.