Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1963, Blaðsíða 111

PETER H.SALUS
More about mannskratti
1N THE past decade two discussions of composita of the type mann-
skratti ‘man-devil, devil of a fellow’ and its Icelandic and West
Germanic relatives have appeared.1 However, outside of a brief
mention of the existence of this ‘type’ of compound in Sanskrit,2
there has been no mention of affinities with ihe composita in other
branches of Indo-European. Indeed, from the two inquiries one
would have to assume that this Kompositionstypus is limited to Ger-
manic and Indic. This is not the case.
Neither Einarsson nor Grönke define just what they mean by ‘type’
or cKojnpositionstypus9, and any discussion of their work must begin
with this definition. Obviously, there are two methods of typological
classification: semantic and morphological.
Semantically, rnannskratti (which is always used as an impreca-
tion) belongs to what we might call the class of pejorative com-
pounds. Ilowever, there are compounds much like mannskratti which
do not fall into this class (e. g. Icel. stelpuskinnið). The semantic
classification is thus unsatisfactory.2
Morphologically, mannskratti is composed of two nouns: mann-
‘man’ and -skratti ‘devil’ -— the latter standing in a case relationship
to the former. Mannskratti thus belongs to the very large class of
1 S. Einarsson, “Compounds of the Mann-skratti type,” Studies in Honor of
Albert Morey Sturtevant (Lawrence, Kansas, 1952), 47—56; and U. Grönke,
“Zum Kompositionstypus mannskratti,” Lingua Islandica — Islenzk tunga III
(1961—62), 39—51.
2 Einarsson, 50—51; Grönke, 42.
3 It is obvious that a ‘type’ such as pejorative compounds is not limited to
any one group of I-E.