Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic: A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550 - Appendices

Anyone familiar with the Modern Icelandic language will know that the  country’s policy is to avoid borrowing lexemes from other languages, and instead  to draw on their own vocabulary. This often results in the formation of a word  pair, consisting of a loanword and its respective native equivalent, as the  process of borrowing systematically eludes the tight tangles of language policy.  But how did this phenomenon develop in the Middle Ages, before a purist ideology  was formed?

This volume offers a unique analysis of a previously unexplored area of Old  Norse linguistics by investigating the way in which loanwords and native  synonyms interacted in the Middle Ages. Through a linguistic-philological  investigation of texts from all medieval Icelandic prose genres, the book maps  out the strategies by which the variation and interplay between loanwords and  native words were manifested in medieval Iceland, and suggests that it is  possible to identify the same dynamics in other languages with a comparable  literary tradition. In doing so, new light is shed on language development and  usage in the Middle Ages and the gap between case-study and general linguistic  theory is bridged over.

Appendices to: Matteo Tarsi, ‘Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550’, Studies in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022)