Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Page 145

The descriptive outcome of the project is concerned with the dynamics of the
interplay between loanwords and native words. They were found to appear in
one or more of the following ways: intrastemmatic variation (i.e. in the same
locus in different MSS), simple alternation (in different loci in a given work or in
the majority of the manuscripts of that work), explicative insertions (cases in
which a native word immediately follows a loanword in an explanatory clause
[seldom vice versa]), synonymic dittologies (cases in which a loanword and a
native word occur in a pair joined by the conjunctions ok/og ‘and’ or eð(u)r/eða
‘or; that is, in other words’).
The etymological outcome of the project consists in the reassessment of ear-
lier etymologies, especially for loanwords.

2.2 Corpus
In carrying out the research, it soon became evident that Icelandic was a particu-
larly well-suited object of study. This is chiefly because of three reasons:
1) Icelandic has an early linguistic norm, which was well established already
in the Middle Ages. Elsewhere in Europe it took more time to select a
linguistic norm, not least because of the prestige held by Latin and its ver-
satility in comparison to vernacular dialects (on the care for the mother
tongue in the Middle Ages see Sverrir Tómasson 1998 [on Icelandic] and,
expanding Sverrir’s reasoning to Europe, Tarsi 2016b).
2) Icelandic has a fairly well-sized and variegated literary production, both
for what concerns chronology and genre.
3) Icelandic provides a very good access to primary sources, both as manu-
scripts and diplomatic editions.
As the aim of the project was to investigate all prosa genres produced in the peri-
od under scrutiny, a corpus was devised whose composition was balanced with
regard to these three principles:
1) Each group of texts should contain a comparable amount of analyzable
material.
2) The chosen texts within each group should be evenly distributed with
regard to their period of composition and that in which a given genre is
produced.
3) The chosen texts within each group should be representative of the man-
uscript transmission of that genre.
Loanwords and native words in Old and Middle Icelandic 145
of generalizations in other Germanic languages up till ca. 1550: English, German and
Swedish.