Orð og tunga - 01.06.2015, Page 33

Veturliði G. Óskarsson: Loanwords with the prefix be-
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language, newspapers and periodical texts can be regarded as being
closer to the register of that language than most official texts, laws, re-
ligious texts and fiction are. A comparison with this database (the Ice-
landic part) does not indicate that the be-words found in the private
letters were frequent in Icelandic periodicals and newspaper texts of
the nineteenth century (up to the year 1900) either. In fact, some of the
words occur even less frequently in this database than in the letters:
words until 1900 (20th and 2T* C.)
befala 18 (132)
begera 0 (10)
behalda 5 (8)
bestikk 1 (45)
bestilla 2 (13)
betala 112 (481)
be-/bítalingur 13 (9)
betrekkja 16 (249)
Table 2. Be-words in the Icelandic part of the timarit.is database.
The number of examples from texts from the twentieth century is
written in brackets; apart from examples of the verb betrekkja, these
are very often from historical texts, reprinted or first printed in the
twentieth century, so they do not say much about the actual use of the
words in question.
The total collection of OH's nearly 300 be-/W-lexemes has not yet
been examined in the same way as was done here. Admittedly, the
results of such an investigation might partly turn out to be different,
and some of the lexemes might just be very common in newspaper
texts of the nineteenth century; but preliminary findings do not sug-
gest that it is very likely.
4 Discussion and conclusion
To summarize, words with the prefix be- (German weak stressed be-,
Danish be-), surfacing in Icelandic as either be- or bí-, entered Icelandic
successively in the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century
(and even a few in the early twentieth century), with a culmination
in the eighteenth century. The collections of the Icelandic University