Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 26

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Orð og tunga
Sveinn Sölvason, praised in an obituary for having been "not snob-
bish in his writings" ("eingi sundrgiorda madr í ritom sínom") and
sympathetic towards the language used by "sensible men" in his time
(Jón Jónsson 1791:20-21),13 has received many negative comments for
his liberal approach, as well as for his style and language in general,
beginning with Rasmus Chr. Rask in 1810 (Rask 1888:85, quoted in
many works). Halldór Hermannsson (1919:22) even counted Sveinn
Sölvason among men that "were willing to sacrifice their mother
tongue". The true fight against loanwords of Danish origin started in
Iceland early in the nineteenth century with the romantic-nationalis-
tic inspired struggle for independence, and reached its culmination
around the middle of the century. It is a good sign of an established
purist view, a century after the publishing of Sveinn Sölvason's book,
that in the introduction to a Latin grammar published in 1868, the
authors, when they defend their Icelandic translations of terms and
their use of Icelandic neologisms, take Sveinn Sölvason as an example
of an author who understood the difficulties of finding and choos-
ing native words when writing about something that has not been
written about before in one's mother tongue; but then they conclude,
after printing Sveinn Sölvason's justification: "Er þetta eigi insolentia
ogfrivola jactantia?", i.e. "isn't this just arrogance and frivolous boast-
ing?" (Latnesk orðmyndunarfræði 1868:VI-VII).
In the nineteenth century, stylistically ironical or sarcastic use of
Danish words or Danish-sounding language was sometimes used
to mock people, or the sort of people, who were prone to use Dan-
ish words, phrases, word order, etc. Examples of this are to be found
as early as 1829 in the annual Ármann á Álþingi (1829-1832; see e.g.
1829:8). The first Icelandic novelist, Jón Thoroddsen, lets some of his
characters, especially people from Reykjavík, mix their language —
often somewhat absurdly — with Danicisms in his novels Piltur og
sti'dka (1850) and Maður og kona (posthumous, 1876), for example by
using words such as begrípa 'understand', bestemt 'definite', betala
'pay', behalda 'keep', and beþenkja 'consider' (1850:90; 1876:274, 327,
329, 390, 391). Also, in a humorous dialogue in the fortnightly news-
paper Þjóðólfur in April 1850 between the editor and his newspaper,14
13 The obituary was ordered by judge Sveinn Sölvason's son ("... at Forlagi sonar
Logmannsins") and cannot be regarded as wholeheartedly objective.
14 In April 1850 the newspaper was released under the title Hljóðólfur and printed in
Copenhagen after the authorities had banned the printing of it in Iceland because
it was going to publish articles about the national meeting to be held at Þing-