Obsolete Scandinavian Loanwords in English

Transcription

1 Studies in English Medieval Language and Literature 26 Obsolete Scandinavian Loanwords in English Bearbeitet von Magdalena Bator 1. Auflage Buch. 264 S. Hardcover ISBN Format (B x L): 14,8 x 21 cm Gewicht: 440 g schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei Die Online-Fachbuchhandlung beck-shop.de ist spezialisiert auf Fachbücher, insbesondere Recht, Steuern und Wirtschaft. Im Sortiment finden Sie alle Medien (Bücher, Zeitschriften, CDs, ebooks, etc.) aller Verlage. Ergänzt wird das Programm durch Services wie Neuerscheinungsdienst oder Zusammenstellungen von Büchern zu Sonderpreisen. Der Shop führt mehr als 8 Millionen Produkte.

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3 Chapter One Introduction 1.1. The aim of the work The earliest study of the Scandinavian loanwords in English, and one of the largest to have been published, is the two-volume dissertation by Björkman ( ). It was followed by such works as Serjeantson (1961; first published in 1935), and, recently, Dance (2003). These works offer an extensive list of words borrowed from Old Norse. However, they concentrate on the appearance and occurrences of the loans, ignoring the fact that a great number of loanwords became obsolete. Therefore, the aim of the present work is to analyse those Scandinavian loans which disappeared from the English language. This study offers a thorough analysis of the factors which contributed to the dying out of the loans in question. The time span which will be investigated is the period from the 15 th c. onwards. The time bracket chosen for the present research has been dictated by the fact that the 15 th c. has often been treated as a turning point in the history of the English language. As indicated by Schlauch (1959: 38), the 15 th c. is often labelled a period of transition. However, from the linguistic point of view, it is the period of an increase in the importance of the English language. By the 15 th c. the role of French had been reduced to a foreign language only. Additionally, at the same time, writing became more general, it was no longer restricted to monastic scriptoria, and a group of professional scribes arose, all of which factors contributed to the spread of literacy among laymen. In 1476 William Caxton introduced the first printing press in England. All this created the need to standardise the English language, which, at the time, was by no means homogenous. Once the written standard had been created and accepted, the dialectal varieties became restricted to the spoken language, and were used exclusively in everyday, informal speech. Additionally, Latin and French, which were used in such areas as law, administration, religion, education, etc., were no longer in use. The present study is to show to what extent the words borrowed chiefly after the Scandinavian invasions were replaced by their equivalents, both, of native and foreign origin, especially French An overview of the previous treatments of the subject The present section offers a survey of the previous studies devoted to the Scandinavian loanwords in English as well as the obsolescence of vocabulary. Here belongs an overview of the various approaches represented by scholars.

4 20 Chapter I Works on Scandinavian loanwords As mentioned at the beginning of the present chapter, the earliest and one of the most extensive studies concerned with the Scandinavian loanwords was Scandinavian loanwords in Middle English by Erik Björkman ( ). He concentrated on the loans present in the Middle English period and based his research mainly on the phonological investigation of the origin of the loans, proposing a number of tests which would allow to prove the etymology of a particular item. He organised his study according to the degree of probability of a word being borrowed from Scandinavian. Björkman ( ) not only offered an impressive list of loanwords from Old Norse together with their occurrences in English but also enriched his study with an account of the contact situation which contributed to the transfer of the Scandinavian vocabulary into English. His contribution was followed by Serjeantson s A history of foreign words in English, first published in She presents in the part devoted to the Scandinavian element in English, an impressive list of words which entered English in the Old and Middle English periods. Serjeantson not only ordered the investigated words according to the time of their occurrence but also with reference to the semantic fields they belonged to, and their provenance. More recently, such well worth mentioning works were published as Hug s Scandinavian loanwords and their equivalents in Middle English (1987), Townend s Language and history in Viking Age England (2002), Dance s Words derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English (2003), and Pons-Sanz s Old Norse (2007). Hug (1987) investigated the restructuring of the vocabulary stock of Scandinavian origin in the Middle English period. She chose three semantic fields, i.e., water, land and air, and analysed the occurrence of the Scandinavian words which belonged to these fields, together with their synonyms, as they appeared in a number of Old and Middle English texts and glossaries. Townend (2002) in his research investigates the Anglo-Norman contact situation. He compares the two languages and researches into the mutual intelligibility of the speakers of both languages. Townend (2002) based his study on linguistic, onomastic, literary and historical aspects. It is grounded on texts from Old English as well as Old Norse. A discussion of the Scandinavian element present in the South-West Midland texts has been offered by Dance (2003). His study has been divided into two parts. Part One plays an introductory role, it describes the historical background, introduces the source materials from which the corpus has been collected, and presents the phonological, morphological and semantic development of the loans. Part Two offers the full list of the words found in the South-West Midland texts which were accepted as derived from Old Norse. These items are discussed individually in an alphabetical order, which makes the study coherent, clearlyorganised and easy to access for reference purposes.

5 Introduction 21 In addition, one work covering the Old English period should be mentioned, i.e., Norse-derived vocabulary in Late Old English texts by Pons-Sanz (2007), who offers an investigation of Norse-derived legal and technical terms used by Wulfstan. Additionally, a number of papers revolving around the Norse element in the Old English period were published by Peters (1981a, 1981b). In the discussion of works concerned with Scandinavian loanwords, we cannot forget about studies devoted to the investigation of the rivalry of particular Scandinavian loanwords with their native equivalents, such as Rynell s The rivalry of Scandinavian and native synonyms in Middle English especially taken and nimen from 1948, followed by a paper by We na (2005) Nim or take? A competition between two high frequency verbs in Middle English ; and Ogura s study The syntactic and semantic rivalry of quoth, say and tell in Medieval English, published in The discussion of Scandinavian loanwords in English also resulted in a number of papers devoted to the geographical distribution of the loans. Here, such papers should be enumerated as M.L.Samuels The Great Scandinavian Belt (1985) and Moskowich-Spiegel Fandiño s (1996) Scandinavian loanwords during the Middle English period: geographical distribution Works on the obsolescence of words Surprisingly little has been written about the obsolescence of words. The earliest studies include those by Trench (1855) and Breal (1883). At the beginning of the 20 th c. the subject was studied by four German scholars, i.e., Hemken (1906), Offe (1908), Oberdörfer (1908) and Teichert (1912), who concentrated on the obsolescence of particular parts of speech. Hemken (1906) in his Das Aussterben alter Substantiva im Verlaufe der englischen Sprachgeschichte divides the reasons for obsolescence into (i) external or cultural, and (ii) internal or psycho-physical, under which he enumerates such factors as: competition with native synonyms; phonological changes resulting in homonymy; euphemisms; false associations, etc. Offe (1908) in his contribution Das Aussterben alter Verba und ihr Ersatz im Verlaufe der englischen Sprachgeschichte discusses the obsolescence of verbs. He describes the same factors of the disappearance of verbs as were suggested by Hemken s (1906) study of nouns. However, Offe (1908) divides them into intentional and subconscious factors. Similar classification has been presented by Oberdörfer (1908) in his investigation of Old English adjectives Das Aussterben alterenglischer Adjektive und ihr Ersatz im Verlaufe der englischen Sprachgeschichte. The last of the contributions Über das Aussterben alter Wörter im Verlaufe der englischen Sprachgeschichte by Teichert (1912) recognises cultural and linguistic conditions responsible for the dying out of words. The former includes foreign influence (Christianity, Scandinavian and French influence). The latter,

6 22 Chapter I according to Teichert (1912) consists of phonological, etymological, semasiologic conditions as well as euphemisms, phonetic changes and new-formations. The list can be enlarged by 2 papers concerned with the reasons for word loss, i.e., Dike (1933), and Visser (1949). Both papers discuss briefly factors such as: a. disappearance of words denoting customs, institutions and things which no longer exist b. homonymy c. polysemy d. influence of historical events e. rivalry of synonyms f. phonological changes g. euphemisms h. prestige A number of treatments revolving around the obsolescence of Scandinavian loanwords deal with the rivalry of synonyms. Such contributions should be mentioned as Rynell s The rivalry of Scandinavian and native synonyms in Middle English, especially taken and nimen, published in 1948, followed by a paper by We na (2005); and later two works by Ogura (1981, 2005), discussing the rivalry of quoth, say and tell and afeard and afraid, respectively. In addition, the work by Ikegami (1963) should be mentioned. It has been devoted to the disappearance of the word dight The corpus and data collecting 1 The material for this study comes from the Oxford English dictionary and the Middle English dictionary. In order to compile the corpus the MED was paged through in search for words of Scandinavian origin. Over 1500 items were found. Next, the OED was confronted to select those of the items which went out of use in the 15 th c. or later. Almost 300 lexemes were collected, which formed the corpus for the present research. The word list was subsequently arranged into semantic fields to make the work coherent and well-organised. Unfortunately, the collecting of data such as this one, i.e., dictionary-based, is beset with a host of problems, which make it impossible to regard the resultant inventory of loanwords as an all-inclusive collection of a finite character. Most importantly, the process of selecting data from dictionaries is fraught with difficulties arising from the limited information concerning a particular loan. 1 For the sake of ready access to all the loanwords analysed in the present work, the whole corpus with the number of section in which each word is discussed has been appended together.