Orð og tunga - 01.06.2014, Page 90

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Orð og tungn
(8) A: Jæja krakkar, boys are back in town. (...)
(■■•)
F: ÞESSIR DAGAR VERÐA FRABÆRIR!!! OH MY
GOD!
Adapted English borrowings include lexical items thathavebeen adapted
to Icelandic grammar and/or spelling by adjusting the orthography to
standard rules of Icelandic phoneme-grapheme correspondence and
to rules of Icelandic grammar (e.g. næs 'nice', ströggln 'to struggle').
With a total of six incidents næs is the most frequent adapted English
borrowing. It is interesting to observe that the word occurs only once
with English spelling but six times with Icelandic orthography. Even
though the corpus can hardly be considered representative this may
indicate the advanced integration of næs into Icelandic. However,
relative to English expressions with original spelling (91 tokens), the
adaption to Icelandic is less common in the corpus (51 tokens). Re-
garding the aforementioned requirements for the full integration of
borrowings into Icelandic this becomes especially interesting.
As seen in the word næs/nice, some terms may occur in both adapt-
ed and unadapted form. The word shit occurs three times with Eng-
lish and twice with Icelandic spelling (sjitt).
(9) A: Sjitt krakkar. Þessi er sko GEIÐVEIKT NÆS.14
(10) A: Kids, hverjir eru með I föstudagsbjor, eg þarf að
kynnast ykkur!
Á: nei shit, kemst ekki, vandræðanlegt.15
Here, the use of either English or Icelandic spelling seems to be of
individual choice. As the examples in (8) and (9) indicate, the same
user tends to either adapt all borrowings in their utterance (sjitt, næs),
or none (kids, shit).
A different strategy may however be observed regarding the ex-
pression like which occurs several times in the corpus. In these occur-
rences, like has a Facebook-related meaning of pressing the /zTce-button
in order to express one's appreciation of a post or comment. In three
of the six examples that occur in the corpus it is unadapted.
(11) A: mikið elska ég starfsmannafélag
reykjavíkurborgar. (...)
B: fáranlegt like á það!16
14 In (9), A finds something very good.
15 In (10), A proposes to meet for a beer but has to take back the proposal later.
16 In (11), A expresses his/her love of the union. B approves.