Orð og tunga - 26.04.2018, Page 55

44 Orð og tunga
salient to speakers than a general connection that may involve several
steps of association.
It is characteristic of self-conscious “creative” coinages in particu-
lar that they invite reinterpretation and “folk etymology”, and that
several interpretations are present at once. This can be seen, for ex-
ample, in nickname formation. For instance, one Icelander had been
called Bassi since childhood, probably as a hypocoristic form of barn
‘child’ plus diminutive suffi x -si. However, as an adult, Bassi played
the string bass (bassi) and sang with a deep bass voice (bassi) (Willson
2007:91). Independent of the ultimate origin of the nickname, the lat-
ter connotations are synchronically part of its meaning to the infor-
mant who reported the anecdote.
4 Loan words and neologisms: atóm vs. frumeind
‘atom’
Icelandic is famous for the comparative success of puristic eff orts to
avoid loan words in favor of neologisms. Atóm is of course an interna-
tional term taken from the Greek, while the “proper” Icelandic term
is frumeind or ‘basic unit’, a neologism from the early twentieth cen-
tury (the oldest att estation in ROH is from 1910).
In contrast to many language communities, in Icelandic native
terms (neologisms) oft en belong to a more formal register or are re-
garded as higher status than loan words; this was shown, for exam-
ple, in a cross-Nordic comparison using match-guise tests (Halldóra
Björt Ewen & Kristiansen 2006:36–37). Subjects were presented with
diff erent versions of the “same” news story which varied in the densi-
ty of loan words. They were told that the speakers were interviewing
for jobs as radio reporters and asked to assess their qualifi cations and
personal characteristics. The cultural salience of the choice between
loan words and neologisms in Iceland is suffi ciently high that many
subjects immediately fi gured out that this was the focus of the experi-
ment and commented that anyone should know that one could not
use such loan words on the radio. Similar results have been obtained
using other methods (Hanna Óladótt ir 2009, Ari Páll Kristinsson &
Hilmarsson-Dunn 2015).
In the case of atóm and frumeind, it is the loan word which acquires
a secondary meaning and which dominates metaphorical uses in com-
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