Orð og tunga - 01.06.2016, Qupperneq 106

96 Orð og tunga
languages, namely Old English (according to Fischer 1909) and
Middle Low German (according to SEO).
Even though this loanword appears in a 12th-century source, it
could nevertheless be maintained that it is much older and that it
reached the North at least during the reign of Haraldr I Gormsson
(10th c.), as att ested by the Jelling-2 rune-stone, where he is celebrated
as the king that “conquered the whole of Denmark and Norway, and
made the Danes Christian”. The adjective Christian is rendered in
fuþark as ᚴᚱᛁᛋᛏᚾᚭ (kristną, Christian, acc.m.pl.).
Since the Christian religion had fi rst been brought to the North by
a Saxon mission during the fi rst half of the 9th century (Skovgaard-
Petersen et al. 1977:155–159) and that Haraldr I was the fi rst king to
promote the new religion in Norway (cf. section 2), it could be said
with some confi dence that the word had been introduced in Norway
during that period, and thence into Iceland, being therefore not a
loanword from Old English, but from OSax. kristīn. Finally, it should
be noted that Lat. -iānus > OSax. -īn is most probably due to analogy.
Indeed, as Gusmani (1981:46) points out, a foreign suffi x might un-
dergo a suffi xal adjustment, according to other lexemes, which are
either semantically near or are themselves earlier borrowings which
have been grouped under the same morphological class (for example
Lat. sūtor > OE. sutere, where the Latin loanword falls under the cat-
egory of names denoting professions; see also Halldór Halldórsson
1969a:75–76).
In this case, Lat. -iānus > OSax. -īn is – I posit – due to the fact that
the loanword was formally adjusted to its semantic opposite, namely
OSax. hēthin ‘heathen’.
The etymology of this word would then be: Icel./OIc. kristinn <
OSax. kristīn < Lat. christiānus.
magister, meistari: Even though
these two loanwords ultimately
derive from the same Latin word,
namely Lat. magister, they are diff er-
entiated both as regards their age in
Icelandic, their lending language and
their use in the modern language.
OIc. magister is a direct learned
loan from Lat. magister and it is fi rst recorded with the meaning
‘teacher, mentor’ in 12th-century sources, such as AM 674 a 4to, one of
Figure 4. Magist’ in AM 674 a 4to, 1v17
tunga_18.indb 96 11.3.2016 14:41:16