Loanwords with the prefix be-in Modern Icelandic: An example of halted borrowing

Abstract

Words with the German prefix be- entered Icelandic from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, mostly from Danish. Nearly 300 words are listed in the Icelandic University Dictionary in Reykjavík. However, almost none of these words are usable in Icelandic today, and the disappearance of these words from the language therefore makes an interesting example of a halted borrowing process. The number of new words belonging to this group entering Icelandic fell drastically in the nineteenth century, and words first attested in twentieth-century texts are almost all from historical novels and sailor language. A few words are native Icelandic neologisms, which suggests that even if the prefix never acquired the role of a model for domestic word formation in Icelandic, it may at least have had the possibility to take on such a role. Words of this type have been criticized by Icelandic language purists and it has been regarded as fact that they were rather frequent in the language of previous centuries. An investigation of a corpus of 1,640 nineteenth-century private letters does, however, not suggest that such words were usual in the language of common people at the time, and neither does a brief comparison with another corpus of nearly 4.5 million pages from 810 magazines and periodicals.

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