Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 15

Veturliði G. Óskarsson: Loanwords with the prefix be- 3
2 be-lbí-words in Icelandic
Before going further, a comment must be made with respect to the
appearance of the prefix in Icelandic.
In Icelandic, the prefix3 in question, etymologically German be-,
has two variants, phonologically surfacing as either /be:/ or /bi:/, in
writing be- and bí-, respectively. Unlike Danish and German, where
the prefix is weakly stressed, both the Icelandic variants carry the
main stress, in accordance with the mandatory rule for stress on first
syllable in Icelandic words. There may have been some awareness
about the accent pattern in Danish (German) in recent centuries, and
the be-variant can occasionally, for rhythmic purposes, be assigned
weak stress in Icelandic poetry. Examples that seem to confirm this
are to be found in various texts, and some of these examples have
been excerpted for the citation-slip collection of OH. Examples that
show mandatory stress on the first syllable of the bc-words in ques-
tion are, though, much more usual. There are also many examples to
be found in poetry of other prefixes (even native Icelandic ones) with
weak stress used for rhythmic purposes, so weak-stressed examples
of í?e-words in Icelandic poetry cannot be used as a reliable evidence
of real-language stress patterns.
The variant bí- coincides, both with respect to stress and pronun-
ciation, with the etymologically unrelated stressed prefix Danish bi-,
which is from (Low/High) German bi-, bei-. This can lead to homo-
nyms in Icelandic, such as Icel. bíleggja^ 'besiege' = Dan. þe'lægge and
Icel. bíleggja2 'settle' = Dan. 'bilægge. This complete overlap between
the Icelandic variant bí- and the Danish/German prefix bi- makes it
more or less impossible for Icelanders to distinguish between the two
(Icel. bí- < Dan./Germ. be- or bi-). The second prefix (Dan./Germ. bi-)
has also entered Icelandic in loanwords from Danish (some 30 words
in total), albeit to a much lesser extent than the first one (Dan./Germ.
be-). In the present study, only original be-words have been included.
Around 12-14% of lexemes with the originally weakly stressed
prefix registered in the OH collections are doublets with be-/bí-, and
usually there is no (evident) difference in meaning between the words
in such a doublet. For example, the verbs bedrífa and bídrífa are re-
3 It would probably be more appropriate to label this segment, which etymologi-
cally speaking is not native to Icelandic, something other than 'prefix' (maybe pre-
formativel), since it can neither be regarded as an active prefix nor a true produc-
tive morpheme in the language, in the usual sense of morpheme.