Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 16

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Orð og tnnga
corded, both meaning 'carry out'. The reasons for the different mani-
festation of the prefix seem to be partly phonological/orthographic
(cf. Veturliði Oskarsson 2003:196 f.), and partly dependent on when
the word was imported (cf. Figure 1, below). Knowledge of the word
accent of Danish (or German) words beginning with bi- (Germ. bi-),
which coincides with the Icelandic accent pattern, may also in some
instances have played a role and led to a lack of ability to keep be- and
bf-words apart.
In what follows, Icelandic words with either of these variants of
the prefix will be labelled 'be-/bí-words'.
2.1 Historical distribution of be-/bi-words in Icelandic
As stated above, a little fewer than 300 different lexemes with the
Danish/German prefix be- are listed in the collections of OH, lemma-
tized as be- or bi-words. In all, 284 lexemes have been included in
the present study. Many of the registered words are derivatives or
compounds with the same root or stem (e.g. *befal- as in befala vb.
and befaling f.). Thus, the number of different word stems is quite a
bit smaller, no more than around 100. (Here, the term "word stem"
is defined somewhat freely as the base stem found in the primary
source languages Middle Low German and High German, rarely
Dutch.) OH covers Modern and Early Modern Icelandic vocabulary
from 1540 on. Almost all Icelandic printed matter until the nineteenth
century, and much from the twentieth century, has been excerpted,
resulting in about 2.5 million excerpts of nearly 700 thousand lexemes
in total. OH's citations indicate that be-/bí- words are predominantly to
be found in official texts of different kinds. Judging by how few ex-
amples have been excerpted of such interesting lexemes as the be-/bí-
words (very often only a single occurrence), they seem to have been
relatively infrequent.
Some of the words are already to be found in Icelandic deeds and
charters from the 15th century, just about the only original text genre
of that period. The first examples show up as early as around 1400: the
verb bíhaga 'please, appeal to' in a text from around 1400, the adjective
beryktaðr 'notorious', also from c. 1400, and the verb befala 'command'
in a text from 1419 (cf. Veturliði Óskarsson 2003).
Figure 1 shows the historical distribution of first (oldest) examples
of the 284 words in question.