Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Side 17

Veturliði G. Óskarsson: Loanwords with the prefix be-
5
be-\vords
i bí-words
15thC. 16thC. 17(h C. 18thC. 19th C. 20th C.
Figure 1. Chronological distribution of the first examples of be-/bí-words in Icelandic.
Included are some past participles of verbs, listed in OH as full en-
tries (as adjectives), and some variant forms that would, in an edited
historical dictionary, probably be treated under one and the same
lemma, such as those words in (1) that appear with both prefix vari-
ants, be- and bí-, and with no (or no apparent) semantic differences:
(1) bedrífa and bídrífa vb. 'carry out' (Dan. bedrive), befala and bífala
vb. 'order, command' (Dan. befale), befaling and bífaling f. 'com-
mand' (Dan. befaling), befatta and bífatta vb. 'deal with; engage in'
(Dan. befatte), begera and bígera vb. 'request' (Dan. begære), behaga
and bíhaga vb. 'please' (Dan. behage), behalda and bíhalda vb. 'keep'
(Dan. beholde), beskiddning and beskyldning f. 'accusation' (Dan.
beskyldning), betjentur and beþjentur m. 'officer' (Dan. betjent).
Only rarely do such doublets appear simultaneously in the texts
for the first time, and what is important is that in Figure 1 we see
a steady growth of new words from the fifteenth to the eighteenth
century, with a culmination in the eighteenth century. We see then a
drastic fall in the nineteenth century with slightly fewer than 40 new
lexemes, which is significantly fewer new words than in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, and less than half the number of new be-/
H-words that entered the language in the century before. (Some of
the new words in the nineteenth century are compounds or deriva-