Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 13

Veturliði G. Oskarsson
Loanwords with the prefix be-
in Modern Icelandic:
An example of halted borrowing
1 Introduction
It is well known that almost no words with the weakly stressed prefíx
be- are to be found in use in Modern Icelandic, that is, words corre-
sponding for example to Danish betale vb. 'pay', behov n. 'need'.1 Such
words are, however, very widespread in the Mainland Scandinavian
languages, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, and form an important
part of their lexicon. Even Faroese has had its share, albeit a consider-
ably more modest one. This word-type became common in the Main-
land Scandinavian languages from the fourteenth century on, mainly
through borrowing from Middle Low German and High German,
and also partly by means of internal productive word formation.
We do not, however, need to search long in the Icelandic texts of
earlier centuries before words of this type do appear. Thus, a quick
glance at the word lists accessible on the homepage of the University
Dictionary in Reykjavík (Orðabók Háskólans, hereafter OH) reveals
1 The study presented in this article is a part of a larger project with participants
from Iceland, Sweden and Belgium, "Language Change and Linguistic Variation
in 19th-Century Icelandic and the Emergence of a National Standard". A prelimi-
nary version of the article was presented as a paper at ICHL21 in Oslo 2013.1 wish
to thank the peer reviewers for their valuable comments on that as well as the cur-
rent version.
Orð og tunga 17 (2015), 1-26. © Stofnun Ama Magnússonar í íslenskum
fræðum, Reykjavík.