Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 29

Veturliði G. Óskarsson: Loanwords with the prefix be-
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tury, Vol. 1, p. 50). It has also another meaning in Icelandic, wholly na-
tive, which Guðmundur Finnbogason coyly hints at with the words
"special reasons", namely 'membrum virile'.
More examples of twentieth-century criticism against words of
this kind can be found; a well-known one is in a satirical article from
1955 by the chief medical officer for Iceland, Dr. Vilmundur Jónsson
(1889-1972), where he, mockingly, recommends the words begrip
'concept', beskyn 'understanding' and bevís 'proof' (Dan. begreb, skon,
bevis) instead of native Icelandic words (Vilmundur Jónsson 1955:6).
Interestingly, Icel. begrip is nowhere to be found in available sources
(cf. OH's collections, and timarit.is), even if the corresponding verb
begrípa 'understand' occurs once in a text from the early nineteenth
century (and a few times in novels from the mid- and late nineteenth
century, used to mimic Danish slang); and the word beskyn has no
direct Danish model at all.
According to the two professors, Sigurður Nordal and Guðmund-
ur Finnbogason, both heavily engaged in language planning, words
with this foreign prefix had more or less fallen out of use by around
1930, but they imply that at least some such words were common
shortly before that. Their first remark, that such words were out of
use, is fairly easy to check, both by looking for them in dictionaries
and by comparing present-day Icelandic. The second statement, that
the words had been common shortly before they wrote their texts, is
maybe more problematic and would need a detailed investigation.
3 be-/bí-words in nineteenth century Icelandic
There is hardly much need to comment at length on why these words
annoyed Icelandic language purists, or why they virtually disap-
peared from the language. The most plausible explanation is that
such obvious loanwords fell prey to the language purification of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a well-known fact that
in the eyes of the Icelandic patriots of the 19th century, and the lan-
guage purists of the following century, an uncorrupted and "clean"
language, without younger loanwords, symbolized the state of the
art before foreign kings gained control over Iceland in the thirteenth
century and later. The loanwords were seen as the "dirt" that had
contaminated the Icelandic language and symbolized the foreign in-
fluence that was important to fight against and eventually get rid of.