Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 31

Veturliði G. Óskarsson: Loanwords with the prefix be-
19
than that. Half of the letters are written by the women, and half by the
men. All the letter writers are born well before 1900 (Haraldur Bern-
harðsson & Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson 2012:3). The chronological distri-
bution of the letters in the corpus is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Chronological distribution of the letters in the corpus. (Cf. Haraldur Bem-
harðsson & Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson 2012:3.)
This corpus is the first and only one of its kind for nineteenth-century
Icelandic. Through it the language of common people can be accessed
better than has previously been possible. Of course, written language
follows its own laws, both those which are in force when a spoken
and/or mentally composed text is written down, as well as meta-
linguistic rules of style and writing fashion; thus, written language
alters and conceals many fundamental elements of spoken language.
Private letters from people with little or no formal education, sent to
relatives and friends, are, however, undoubtedly less subject to for-
mal customs and norms than the written language of those who are
accustomed to writing.
A search for occurrences of be- or bz'-words in these letters reveals
a total of 41 examples of eight words, 40 with the variant be- and one
with the variant bí- ("bitalingin" m. acc. 'the payment'). Moreover,
one letter writer has once, in a short and rather formal letter to the
dean of the church district, begun writing the verb bítala 'pay' but de-
letes it and writes instead the native Icelandic greiða, same meaning.17
17 "Skal jeg [bij greiða þegar fundum okkar ber samann" 'I shall pay next time we
meet' (13 June 1866, Vigfús Pétursson, a farmer in East Iceland, bom c. 1829).