Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.2023, Síða 100

5. The preposition án after the Reformation
5.1 Descriptions in dictionaries and grammars
Subsequent to the Bible translations mentioned above, the prepositional
case of án seems to have been fixed as the genitive. In the 17th century,
several important dictionaries appeared, including Specimen lexici runici
(Magnús Ólafsson 1650), which is considered the first printed Icelandic
dictionary (e.g., Böðvar Guðmundsson et al. 2006:497). This dictionary
contains the entry án (“aan”) and here we can find two expressions: Aan
er ills geingis nema heiman haffe ‘ill luck is home-bred’ and Þad er minstur
aan ad vera ills aan ‘It is the least amount of failure to be without evil’, in
which the preposition án governs the genitive.11 Around the same period,
Runólfur Jónsson, in his Grammaticæ Islandicæ rudimenta (1651:166),
classifies án (“aan”) as a preposition governing the genitive. The second
Icelandic dictionary Lexicon Islandicum (Guðmundur Andrésson 1683),
also asserts that án (“än”) governs the genitive. These three works associ-
ate án with the genitive without mentioning other possibilities, and it
seems plausible to assume that around the middle of the 17th century, the
prepositional case of án was fixed to the genitive. In the Icelandic-Latin-
Danish dictionary, Lexicon Islandico-Latino-Danicum (Björn Halldórsson
1814), published under the supervision of Rasmus Kristian Rask, án is
regarded as governing the genitive, and in this period, the accusative use
might already have been considered archaic. In contemporary Icelandic,
Íslensk orðabók (ÍO) specifies that the accusative and dative use is archaic.

5.2 The preposition án and archaic styles
The data in this study contain relatively few examples of án from after
the Reformation, although ROH provides examples of all the oblique
cases occurring with that preposition (12a–d):
(12) a. og hét honum án síns daglegs
and promised him without his-own(G) daily(G)
verðkaups góðum launum
reward(G) good reward
‘and promised him a good reward above his daily wage’ (ROH)
Yuki Minamisawa100
11 The latter expression contains two examples of án; the dictionary specifies the first
án as a noun, corresponding to the Latin ‘defectus’ (‘failure, lack’) in meaning.