Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 14

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Orð og tunga
almost 300 different lexemes excerpted from Icelandic texts from
the sixteenth century till the twentieth century. The absence of such
words from Modern Icelandic today may, then, seem a little puzzling,
but the most probable explanation — an explanation that one would
take for granted a priori — is that they were "cleaned away" in the lan-
guage purification of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Words
of this kind certainly did find their way into the language and did
exist there for some centuries; and then they vanished almost com-
pletely. This makes them an interesting example of a halted process
of borrowing that was very successful in the neighbouring languages
(Danish, Norwegian and Swedish), and apparently well underway
in Icelandic, but that in the end still came to naught. Parallels, albeit
less comprehensive and systematic, are well known with respect to
various other loanwords in Icelandic in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries; they disappeared into thin air due to language purification.
Various Post-Reformation morphological innovations in Icelandic,
which had become general, were also suppressed (Kjartan Ottósson
1987; 1990:70-72), and even a fundamental change in the pronuncia-
tion of vowels was reversed in the twentieth century (see e.g. Jahr
1989:105-108).
In this article, I intend to look more closely at this group of words
in Icelandic, their history and their fate. The structure of the article is
as follows. Chapter 2 begins with a remark about the different, and
language specifíc, appearance of the prefíx be- in Icelandic as either
'be-' or 'bí-'. In subsection 2.1, the historical distribution of be-/bí-
words in Icelandic is discussed, while in subsection 2.2, I proceed to
discuss words of this type in Modern Icelandic. Subsection 2.3 deals
with attitudes towards loanwords with the suffix; there is a brief dis-
cussion on the Scandinavian languages and Faroese, followed by a
more thorough one about the Icelandic situation. Chapter 3, building
on the previous chapter, discusses such words in a corpus of 1,640
nineteenth-century Icelandic private letters, with some comparison to
another corpus of magazines and periodicals from the same century.
Finally, the results are briefly discussed in Chapter 4.
2 The best historical overview of Icelandic language policy in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries is to be found in Kjartan G. Ottósson (1990). For overviews
in English, see e.g. Ari Páll Kristinsson (2012); Kristján Arnason (2003), who has a
more general survey of language policy through the centuries, with a short over-
view of more recent times on pp. 273-275; and Stefán Karlsson (2004), who has a
fairly good, but short, overview of purism and language cultivation, esp. on pp.
36-38.