Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 24

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Orð og tunga
33 such words are to be found in J.C. Svabo's Faroese dictionary from
1770 (in msv first published 1966), while only seven words are includ-
ed in the first printed Faroese dictionary from 1891. The use of five of
these words is discouraged with better native words being suggested
(Simonsen 2002:83; Hansen, Jacobsen & Weyhe 2003:170-171). How-
ever, neither in Norwegian nor in Faroese has this antipathy towards
be-/bí-words resulted in their near elimination in the same way as has
happened in Icelandic, even if opposition to them is still present, both
in Norwegian and Faroese, albeit less dominantly than earlier. Thus,
at least 44 be-words are included in the Danish-Faroese dictionary
from 1995 (Petersen & Staksberg 1995), which builds on a "liberal de-
scriptive approach and lists many words which are regularly heard in
spoken Faroese" (Hansen, Jacobsen & Weyhe 2003:170-171). Simonsen
(2002:87) points out, however, that numerous everyday words have
still been excluded from the book, and that the monolingual Faroese
dictionary from 1998 (Poulsen et al. 1998) contains only 12 foe-words
(Simonsen 2002:88).
Also in Denmark, there has historically been some occasional re-
sistance to German loanwords with be-, both in the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, albeit mostly insignificant opposition and much
more peripheral than in the aforementioned Scandinavian languages,
and often only practised by a few language purists without resulting
in any widespread dissemination.10
In Sweden, Viktor Rydberg (1828-1895), one of the country's most
important authors in the nineteenth century, was a dedicated oppo-
nent of German loanwords, especially words with German affixes.
Thus, in his essay "Tysk eller nordisk svenska" from 1873 (Rydberg
1910), he devotes 18 pages solely to the prefix be- (pp. 329-347). And
as recently as in the late twentieth century, the Swedish linguist Björn
Collinder (1894-1983) published a popular dictionary in which he
proposes many replacements for words with the prefix be- (Collinder
1975:36-38).
The earliest signs of an Icelandic dislike of words of this type are
to be found in the middle of the eighteenth century. This is echoed
in judge Sveinn Sölvason's (1722-1782) justification for using a num-
ber of loanwords of Danish origin, such as bevísing, betaling and other
10 For anti-German linguistic attitudes in Denmark in the 1940s, see Jacobsen
(1973:55 ff.); on fce-words, pp. 72-76 (with endnote 51, p. 196). Cf. also Hansen &
Lund (1994:126) for a short comment about opposition to the German prefixes an-,
be-, er- and ge- in a Danish dictionary from 1875.