Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 32

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Orð og tunga
This may indicate that this person was aware that words of this kind
were not acceptable, at least after the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury. However, it must be admitted that a single example in a fairly
formal letter is not a particularly strong indication of such awareness.
words ex. year writers
befala vb. 'command' (15/16th C.) 3 1857-1868 2
begera vb. 'request' (16lh C.) 2 1842 1
behalda vb. 'keep' (15/17lh C.) 1 1860 1
bestikk n. 'chart room' (c. 1800) 1 1915 1
bestilla vb. 'engage; order' (17th C.) 13 1821-1868 4
betala vb. 'pay' (15/17th C.) 4 1829-1843 4
betalingur m. 'payment' (16lh C.) 10 1852-1864 5
betrekkja vb. 'wallpaper' (1860) 7 1874-1934 4
Table 1. The be-words in the letter corpus (the century of the earliest recorded example
in Icelandic appears in brackets).
The words and examples in question are not particularly numerous;
eight words and 41 examples, and only one word, the verb betrekkja,
is first evidenced in the nineteenth century according to OH. Most of
the other words are much older.
Interestingly, seven of the thirteen examples of the verb bestilla are
from letters of one and the same writer (in fact five in one and the
same letter); six of ten examples of betalingur are from letters by two
writers (thereof one with the variant bí-); and four of the seven exam-
ples of betrekkja are from letters by one writer, in 1886-1887 (two are
from letters from 1905 and 1934).
The examples of the verb befala are both included in the old letter
greeting "befala e-n Guði" etc. 'command sb. to God'.
Admittedly, 916,000 items is not a particularly huge corpus for
lexicological investigation. However, these results are interesting in
their own right and they support the conclusion that words of this
type were not very common, or at least not central, in the vocabulary
of common people in nineteenth-century Iceland.
This can be compared to another corpus. The digital library tima-
rit.is at the National and University Library of Iceland contains at
present almost 4.5 million pages from 810 magazines and periodi-
cals, mostly Icelandic but also a few Faroese and Greenlandic ones.
Even if this material cannot be said to be representative of common