Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2009, Síða 126

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Veturliði G. Óskarsson
Widding, Ole (útg.). 1960. Alkuin i norsk-islandsk overlevering og udvidelser til Jonsbogens
kapitel om domme. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ A 4. Ejnar Munksgaard, K0benhavn.
Þorleifur Halldórsson. [1711-1713] 1915. An Icelandic Satire (Lof lýginnar). Written at the
beginning ofthe eighteenth century by Þorleifur Halldórsson. Utg. Halldór Hermannsson.
Islandica 8. Cornell University Library, Ithaca.
Þórir Óskarsson. 1990. Sundurgreinilegar tungur. Um mál og stíl Nýja testamentis Odds
Gottskálkssonar. Biblíuþýðingar í sögu ogsamtíð, bls. 203-221. Studia theologica islan-
dica 4. Háskóli Islands, Guðfræðistofnun, Reykjavík.
SUMMARY
‘On the verb blífa, its growth and development in Icelandic’
Keywords: loanwords, Middle Low German, Icelandic, Bible translations
This paper discusses the Icelandic verb blífa ‘be; remain; become’ that was borrowed into
Icelandic in the late I4th century or in the beginning of the I5th century from Norwegian
and Danish. The Middle Low German verb bliven ‘remain, continue to be, stay ...’ had a
relatively easy access to the Scandinavian languages because they lacked a single verb with
a strong meaning of ‘remain’. The verb acquired a new meaning in the Scandinavian main-
land languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) as the verbs verða ‘become’ and vera ‘be,
remain’ had merged in most of the main dialects due to disappearance of the dental in the
first one, which gradually led to an almost total lack of a single verb with the meaning
‘become’. This did not happen in Icelandic, which may explain the relatively modest use of
the verb the first one hundred years or so. In the middle of the lóth century, the
Norwegian-Icelandic bishop’s son Oddur Gottskálksson used the word considerably rich-
ly in his Icelandic translation of the New Testament (published in Denmark 1540). It is
argued in this paper that the verb would not have had particularly good chances of surviv-
ing in Icelandic if it had not been because of the use of it in the New Testament of 1540,
a text which lived on in following editions of the Bible until the middle of the I9th centu-
ry. Editors of the text of the Bible do not, however, seem to have been altogether satisfied
with the word, and occurrences of it in the New Testament decreased steadily over the
next centuries until the last examples were eliminated in the edition of 1841. Those who
read religious texts had for three centuries been confronted with the verb, but it does not
seem to have been used especially much in other text genres, even if it surely occurs in
most text types. In one well-defined meaning the word has, however, survived to the mod-
ern language, in the meaning ‘lasts, will stand the test of time’, and in recent years it seems
even to have grown in use in this meaning.
Veturliði G. Óskarsson
Menntavísindasviði
Háskóla Islands
Stakkahlíð
lS-105 Reykjavík, ÍSLAND
veturosk@hi.is