Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1963, Page 82

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HALLDÓR HALLDÓRSSON
kosturinn sennilegastur, án þess þó að fullyrt sé, að hann hljóti að
vera réttur. Mólið er þannig vaxið, að um þetta verður ekkert sann-
að, og verður því hver að trúa því, sem honum trúlegast þykir.
Háskóla Islands,
Reykjavík.
SUMMARY
The present article deals with the different meanings of the Icelandic word
kvistur and in particular with some phrases of which kvistur or some of its deri-
vatives constitute the basic word.
The prepositional phrase í kvikurn kvisti is found in three medieval and one
19th century Icelandic sources and means ‘in living property’, i. e. ‘in live stock’.
The author points out that lcvistur, properly meaning ‘a twig, branch’, might have
developed the meaning ‘a unit of measure’ in a similar way as the Scandinavian
words corresponding to Icelandic sneis and vglr. The meaning ‘unit of measure’
might have developed into ‘property’ (perhaps through the intermediate stage
‘unit of price’) in the same way as Icel. alin (öln), which has changed its
meaning in that way.
The metaphorical phrase komast ekki í kvist við ‘not to be equal to’ first
occurs in the 17th century, and in the 18th century the following three variants
are found: komast ekki í háljkvisti við, komast ekki í jajnkvisti við and komast
eigi meir en í háljan kvist við. In former attempts to trace the origin of these
phrases it has been presumed (1) that the variants containing -kvisti are primary,
(2) that kvisti is a neuter action noun from kvista ‘to prune off’. The author
shows: (1) that the only meaning of kvisti known in Icelandic is ‘pruned off
branches’, (2) that the formation of the word makes it more likely that lcvisti
is a collective rather than an action noun, and (3) that hálfkvisti and jafnkvisti
in the above phrases might just as well be the acc. pl. of *háljkvistur and *jajn-
kvistur, as the ending -u in the acc. pl. of the n-stems like lcvistur had in many
words changed into -i some time before the earliest occurrences of these phrases.
The author finds it most likely that the phrasal verb komast í means ‘to reach,
attain’ in the phrases in question.
In the last part of the article the author sets forth some possibilities of ex-
plaining the origin of the phrases in question, three of which may be summari-
zed here:
1) Presuming that kvistur and kvisti (n.) are collectives, the phrases conld