Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2021, Page 147

Native words are divided into three categories: calques, neoformations and
inherited lexemes. Calques are of two kinds: semantic and structural. Semantic
calques are words which are already present in the lexicon (they are mostly
inherited words), but acquire a new meaning due to foreign influence. Stuctural
calques are word-by-word (or morpheme-by-morpheme) renderings of their
model. Inherited lexemes are lexical items which satisfy the following two con-
ditions: 1) their formal evolution can be either documented or reconstructed in a
given language or direct ancestors; 2) their semantics is explainable by means of
internal reconstruction. In the present work, an inherited word is defined with
respect to the word stock which is believed to have existed in Proto-Germanic.
Finally, two outlier foreign-word categories were found, which have never-
theless been included in the analysis, for they, too, witness foreign influence:
nonce borrowings and scribal abbreviations. The latter are conventional brachy-
graphic signs employed when writing manuscripts; the former are foreign lex-
emes which meet the following two requirements: 1) they (usually) do not show
phonological or morphological adaptation to the structure of the recipient lan-
guage and 2) they occur in a text paired together, i.e. as explicative insertions,
with their native synonyms, which are inherited lexemes.
The following five word pairs exemplify the above-listed categories:7
• dominus – dróttinn
scribal abbr. – semantic calque
• evangelista – goðspjallamaðr/goðspjallaskáld
prestige borr. – structural calque
• kirkja – guðshús
necessity loan – neoformation or structural calque (cf. Lat. domus Dei
and dominicum)
• kólorr (rectius: kolorr) – litr
prestige borr. – inherited lexeme
• papaver – svefngrass
nonce borr. – neoformation
The analytical model presented above has been implemented by research of three
kinds:
1) Textual and manuscript research. It analyzes the variation relevant to
the phenomenon under scrutiny from the perspective of textual transmis-
sion (intrastemmatic analysis). It moreover addresses the dynamics with
which loanwords and native words appear in a given text. Furthermore,
it investigates the issue of whether distinct text genres differ in witness-
Loanwords and native words in Old and Middle Icelandic 147
7 They are not an exhaustive specimen of combinations, since all combinatorial pos-
sibilities are found in the corpus.