Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Side 98

88 Orð og tunga
German4. Direct borrowing from Latin5 was of course present, albeit
to a minor extent (cf. Halldór Halldórsson 1969b:109–112).
3 Semantic classification
The words which, according to my research, constitute the oldest bor-
rowed Christian terminology in Icelandic total 45. These words are all
fi rst att ested either in prose or poetry, thought to have been produced
between the 10th and the 13th centuries, although the manuscripts in
which these literary works are preserved are sometimes more recent
copies.
The corpus is semantically multifaceted, as it consists of words de-
noting several diff erent, albeit complementary, aspects of the early
life of the Church in the North.
For the sake of presenting the corpus in a way which, although
schematic, is mainly aimed at giving a bird’s-eye view on its semantic
variety, a basic classifi cation into four categories is proposed, namely
ecclesiastical titles, buildings and architectural parts, litur-
gy-related terms and beings and places of the christian doc-
trine.
4 With ‘Old Saxon’ and ‘Middle Low German’ is actually meant two diff erent but
consecutive stages of the same language, namely Low German. Chronologically,
the former, most ancient, stage is said to range from the 9th century to the second
half of the 12th century, while the latt er ranges from the beginning of the 13th cen-
tury to 1500 (cf. Veturliði Óskarsson 2003:147).
5 Latin borrowings in Icelandic are of two kinds, namely indirect and direct. The
former comprises all those borrowings which ultimately stem from Latin but have
been mediated by one or more languages before entering the Icelandic language.
The latt er are loanwords which, albeit being directly borrowed from Latin, are
classifi able in two subgroups, namely early and late borrowings. Under the for-
mer label are all those common Germanic borrowings which stem from early con-
tacts between Latin and Germanic speakers while the latt er comprise the so-called
learned borrowings (see also Raschellà 1988:91–93 and Tarsi 2014a:3). Late direct,
as well as some indirect, Latin borrowings in Old Icelandic are usually considered
to stem from the so-called Vulgar, i.e. nonstandard, Latin, as opposed to Classi-
cal Latin. The notion of Vulgar Latin is, however, somehow fuzzy, as it aims to
comprise all the Latin sociolects spoken in the Roman Empire, from which the
Romance languages later arose. Vulgar Latin words are oft en also very diffi cult
to fi nd in texts and are therefore oft en reconstructed. However, Vulgar Latin also
constitutes a “serviceable term” – as Adams (2013) puts it – when investigating
those particular varieties of Latin, which laid the ground for the Romance lan-
guages in the Middle Ages (cf. Adams 2013:3–11). It is in fact with this latt er spirit,
that this label has been used in this article.
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