Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Page 100

90 Orð og tunga
inscription, and the absence of a native synonym6 in Old Icelandic
strongly suggest that the word must have been borrowed earlier (see
section 4 for further discussion). Also, other borrowings are, in my
opinion, to be regarded as of primary importance in the evangelisa-
tion of Iceland, since they denote things and concepts upon which the
new religion was fundamentally based; these are: altari, biskup, djöfull,
engill, kirkja, kristinn, kross, messa, páfi , paradís, páskar, postuli, prestur,
signa. The main idea behind this sub-categorisation is that primary
concepts are bound to be introduced at a very early stage; their func-
tion being to lay the ground for the new doctrine. A similar view,
i.e. that the Christian vocabulary is at least partially older than the
oldest texts in which it is preserved, has already been put forward
by Jón Friðjónsson (1997:xxxvii), who also quotes a newspaper arti-
cle by Stefán Karlsson (1993), where he asserts that “a new religion
needed new ways of wording things. New words were in part taken
from the international language of the Church, Latin, which had bor-
rowed many of them from Greek. The majority of such loanwords
were related to ecclesiastical roles, religious buildings and the litur-
gy” (1993:30, my translation).
4 Some examples from the corpus
In this section a sample of ten words will be analysed. They have been
chosen primarily for their importance both from a historico-linguistic
and etymological perspective. As regards the former, the words have
been chosen (altari, biskup, djöfull, erki-, kristinn, páfi ) partly in order
to show, as do Halldór Halldórsson (1969b) and Veturliði Óskarsson
(2003:147–153), that the role played by Old Saxon in the lexical enrich-
ment of the early Old Icelandic Christian lexicon is broader than usu-
ally acknowledged. As regards the latt er, the words have been chosen
in order to discuss the etymologies proposed by AeW, IeW and ÍOb
and, in most cases, to bett er defi ne or even amend them.
6 A native partial synonym of OIc. kristinn is OIc. rétt trúaðr, fi rst recorded as early
as 1200 (cf. ONP). However, the latt er does not seem to be used interchangeably
with the former, even though it clearly denotes a moral quality of those who then
were baptised and therefore became Christians. (Cf. the following example from
the Icelandic Homily Book (ms. Holm perg 15 4to, ca. 1200, f27r:5–6), here given in
normalised orthography: […] en nú eru allir rétt trúaðir kenndir við Krist |6 sjalfan ok
kallaðir kristnir menn.)
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