Íslenzk tunga - 01.01.1965, Page 64

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HALLDÓR HALLDÓRSSON
used the phrase *Drepiþ stallá, i.e., ‘strike the place (with your
feet)’, in the meaning ‘make halt’. All the other phrases might have
a similar origin. But this cannot be proved. It is only the military
meaning of the Old French phrase prendre estal that points in this
direction.
V
Finally it is necessary to go through all the variants of the phrase
and try to explain each of them.
1) The adjective stalldrœpr most probably owes its origin to the
phrase. It is only found in poetry and I am inclined to believe that
the complicated Old Icelandic meters have contributed to its for-
mation. The word stalldrœpr is a kind of condensate of the phrase,
and it was just the sort of condensation which the complicated Old
Icelandic meters demanded. The first instance is found in Arnór
jarlaskáld’s Hrynhenda. We know that he knew the phrase. Why
should not he also have made the adjective?
2) It is necessary before I explain each variant of the phrase to
point out that the word stallr or *stallaz already in Proto-Germanic
seems to have undergone a change of meaning which according to
the late Gothenburg Professor Gustaf Stern’s terminology is called
permulation,77 According to this terminology a permutation is the
change in the meaning of a word in a phrase, where it does not
matter that the word is apprehended in a new sense in the phrase,
as the phrase referent in both cases will be the same. I can as an
example take the Icelandic phrase ganga til hvílu and the corre-
sponding Swedish phrase gd till vila, both meaning ‘to go to bed’.
The Icelandic word hvíla is in this context concrete, means ‘bed’;
the Swedish word vila is on the other hand abstract, means ‘rest’.
The Swedish sense of the word is the original, the Icelandic meaning
is secondary. In the phrase ganga lil hvílu it has not been of any im-
77 See his classical work, Meaning and Change of Meaning with Special Re-
ference to the English Languagc (Göteborgs Ilögskolas Arskrift XXXVIII,
1932:1; Cöteborg 1931), 351—379.