Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1961, Qupperneq 77
ICELANIHC dialectology: methods and results
75
Old Icelandic. Rýna, which is known in Modern Icelandic only, is fre-
quent in the North-West. Otherwise, it is known only in the South-
East, in the compounds rýnumenni and rýnulegur.
On the other hand, the same word may have different meanings in
different parts, e. g. sáta, meaning, in the North and West, ‘one of
the two trusses of hay carried on horse-back’, but, in the South and
East, ‘a haystack (in the field)’. In some cases the difference is even
so important that serious misunderstandings or embarassing situa-
tions may arise, as when a Northerner, for whom the adj. bjáljalegur
simply means ‘weakly (about persons who are or have been ill)’,
uses the word talking to a man from the South, East or West, where
the meaning is ‘silly-Iooking, stupid’.11
A great number of such difíerences are known. In Blöndal’s Dic-
tionary, which contains much material collected from the everyday
spoken language, about 5500 words are marked as being limited in
their distribution and belonging to a definite part of the country,
even to a particular county. This figure, of course, is by no means
reliable. On the one hand, a number of words taken from printed
sources and therefore left unmarked in the dictionary are undoubted-
ly limited in their distribution. On the other hand, in very many
cases, words have a wider distribution than is indicated in the dic-
tionary.12 Nevertheless, this figure gives a rough impression of the
material and of the vast task for future research in this field.
But, although the existence of these vocahulary differences has
been known for a long time, very little has yet been done by way of
systematic investigation of the geographic distribution of wrords or
their meanings. The earlier work mentioned above was more in the
nature of a haphazard collection of curiosities. As late as 1943, Hall-
dór Halldórsson, sketching a program for these studies, wrote:13
11 See H. Halldórsson, “Um málvöndun,” Stígandi I (1943), p. 24.
12 Jónsson, “Lítil athugun_,” p. 142.
13 “Um málvöndun,” p. 24:
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