Rit (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) - 01.06.1970, Page 401
399
(< krok) and Sw. socker (< sukker) mentioned above. Synchron-
ically, these cases cannot be kept apart from the examples
mentioned in (3b-d) above, where in most of the cases it is
a question of a change of meaning of a more or less unaltered
sign-expression. Another example is Sw. skratta ‘laugh’, Da.
skratte ‘rattle’. Perhaps Sw. spotta ‘spit’, Da. spotte ‘scorn’ also
belongs here, or the Swedish form may have developed from
sputta.
*
Just as the term homonymy is of doubtful validity in an
inter-Nordic context, it is hardly possible to bring in the
notion of synonymy, either, in this context; it also belongs
within one language system. In a way it is homonymy turned
round: different sign-expressions for the same content. How-
ever, when ‘boy’ is called dreng in Danish, gutt in Norwegian,
and pojke in Swedish, these words are not synonyms, but terms
compulsory for each language system in its own right. In
Swedish, on the other hand, pojke and gosse are synonyms.
On a comparative inter-Nordic basis synonymity can be
brought in, however, in the special cases when a sign from one
language is used as a stylistic or semantic variant in one of the
others, where normally another sign-expression is used to
cover the basic meaning, e.g., when gut (No. gutt) is used in
Danish with the connotation ‘brave, spirited’. In poetic dic-
tion vár, host, and kvœld (cf. No. and Sw.) are used in Danish
for normal forár, efterár, and aften.
*
It is possible to see some of the relations of meaning de-
scribed above in the light of the modern theory of semantic
fields, and to present the examples graphically, especially
where partly complementary distribution is involved. One
way is to use enclosing (overlapping) circles, as is done with
partly identical synonyms in a certain language system: