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The article reconsiders a magic chant interpretation in the Old Man's Lament in the poem "Beowulf," wherein an anonymous father is depicted mourning for his deceased child. It discusses the sorrow in the lyric of the poem and argues that the elegy sang by the father alludes to a ritual practice with Odinic associations and is a magic chant intended to restore life to the dead. It analyzes the context of Old Man's Lament and relates it to Germanic mythology and its use of Old Norse language.

One name for Óðinn that has long produced disagreement among scholars is Farmatýr ("god of cargoes"). Some construe the name in connection with the equation of Mercury and *Wōðanaz during the Common Germanic period, while others construe the name in connection with kennings associated with Óðinn. Drawing on a passage in Beowulf to which the name has never been related, we propose that Farmatýr refers to Óðinn's connection with the ship burial ritual and reflects an expectation that Óðinn would receive the cargo that was loaded onto funerary ships dispatched to the afterlife. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English language is an exceptional linguistic system that has fascinatingly evolved over time. English has been affected by a variety of influences and circumstances, from its beginnings as a Germanic language spoken by tribes in what is now England to its current role as a worldwide lingua franca. The vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of English have undergone substantial changes over its history, reflecting the intricate interplay between cultures, communities, and technological breakthroughs. This article traces the history of the English language, emphasizing the key factors that have influenced its form and structure along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of Norse loanwords in Old English poetry seems to be restricted to historical poems in praise of prominent contemporaries. It is demonstrated that the few Norse loans in these poems neither contribute to the laudatory character of such texts nor serve as new, additional means of stylistic enrichment. Instead, the Norse loans in these late Old English historical poems can be shown to have been used to add factual plausibility to such poems as historical texts. This contrasts with the use of Norse loanwords in Middle English poems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the origin of the 16th to 18th-century underclass slang word autem mort which means married woman. Topics include the definition of the word in the "Oxford English Dictionary," the early lexicographer's description of autem mort, the first element of autem mort for which the OED has a very limited commentary, and the origin of the term from Old Norse murta or small trout or other fish.

This article on Old Norse represents a fundamental departure from the previous literature on loaned material by examining multilingual documents written in Medieval Latin rather than in monolingual English, namely the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). The potential of this richer and more complex interplay between languages will be further addressed throughout the article, which assesses the different kinds of evidence available for establishing the relative plausibility for a word being derived from ON. Dance's (2013, 2018, 2019) taxonomy will be discussed and applied to multilingual material for the first time. The article concludes with some notes on the main semantic fields to which ON-derived lexis contributed within the multilingual lexical networks of the DAR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the etymology of the term "beagle," tracing its origins from Middle English and speculating on its possible connections to Old Norse and Celtic languages, shedding light on its evolution and usage over time. Topics include the potential Celtic influence on the name, the linguistic connections to Old Norse terms for dogs, and the cultural and economic significance of beagles in medieval English society.

Copyright of Etnolingwistyka is the property of Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides an analysis of kennings for 'raven' and 'eagle', taking a closer look at the choice and meanings of base-words, their connection with determinants and the formation of kenning patterns. It investigates the role of kenning parts in establishing the meaning of the referent, also taking into consideration adjectives and adjectival elements of compounded base-words. The article is also a test case for how information can be drawn from a new kenning lexicon in form of an online-database. The database format offers various possibilities to structure the corpus of kennings, for instance allowing the article's focus on details concerning the construction of kennings and the usage and combination of base-words and determinants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to explore the internal form of the central characters’ names in the Eddic Skírnir’s Journey. Proper names mentioned in the song are regarded as relevant markers of the plot that echoes the fertility myth. The author aims to substantiate that the genre structure of the song is shaped by semantic motivations behind character names, and to prove that the same logic extends to other genres represented in the song with their linguistic and stylistic peculiarities. “Speaking” names with explicitly expressed semantic motivations are the key to an adequate interpretation of the Eddic song Skírnir’s Journey that presents Skírnir as a “shining” mediator likened to a sunbeam, contributing to the marriage of Freyr, the god of fertility and one of the Vanir, and the giantess Gerðr of the jötunns, that personifies the “fenced-in” Earth. The cult of fertility is the most archaic layer, the mythological implication of the plot of the song. The transparency of the internal form of the names, reflecting the nature of the respective characters, attests to the semantic openness typical of “nominative” texts which serve exclusively as a verbal act illustrating the creative function of naming. These names refer directly to the creation myth as their precedent; they also determine the functions of a particular genre as part of the studied Eddic song.

We present a dataset of named entities in three languages: Medieval Latin, Middle High German and Old Norse. The dataset, containing proper nouns of persons and places, was originally created to extract characters from three related medieval texts. Since the annotation is on low-resource pre-modern languages, they may be important to build named-entity recognition tools for languages with little data and high linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's discussion of the Norse origin of the terms OE afol and ME afell. Association of the rejection of uncommon vocabulary with Saxonisms is presented. He discusses Middle English Syllable Lengthening. He also mentions the interaction between Old English and Old Norse speakers.

The purpose of this article is to show the internal integrity of the Eddic Grímnismál (Sayings of Grímnir), putting forward that the proper name is the key element for understanding the structure and meaning of this Eddic song. The name with transparent semantic motivation can both explicate the key features of denotata in thulas that represent comprehensive classification schemes, and implicate them (cf. the multiplicity of names of Odin, concealing his true name and nature). The author considers the end of the song, when Odin unveils his identity, rejects his false names and uses a true one (I, Odin), as a marker of Odin’s special ecstatic state revealing the knowledge about the origin and the structure of the universe, as well as the true essence of Odin. The opposition of the names explicating the properties of named objects (personalized elements of the universe in the concept of cosmogenesis: rivers, deers, etc.) and subjects (i.e. actors, like Valkyries or Odin himself), on the one hand, and the names implicating them, on the other, is neutralized in the act of sacrifice when Odin comprehends the origin and the structure of the universe. Proper names are, thus, interpreted as a clip uniting the two parts of Grímnismál — the prose frame and the main poetic part of the song. The author argues that Grímnismál represents an ideal model of the universe embodied by the first and best proper name.

This article undertakes the first systematic examination of Frank's (1979, 1981, 1987, 1990, 2007b, 2008) claim that Old Norse influence is discernible in the language of Beowulf. It tests this hypothesis first by scrutinizing each of the alleged Nordicisms in Beowulf , then by discussing various theoretical considerations bearing on its plausibility. We demonstrate that the syntactic, morphological, lexical, and semantic peculiarities that Frank would explain as manifestations of Old Norse influence are more economically and holistically explained as consequences of archaic composition. We then demonstrate that advances in the study of Anglo-Scandinavian language contact provide strong reasons to doubt that Old Norse could have influenced Beowulf in the manner that Frank has proposed. We conclude that Beowulf is entirely devoid of Old Norse influence and that it was probably composed ca. 700, long before the onset of the Viking Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Old Icelandic relative clauses are frequently preceded by the pronoun sá, considered by most grammars to be a demonstrative. Using a large corpus of Old Icelandic prose, I show that when sá precedes relative clauses, it is often ambiguous between a cataphoric demonstrative (referring ahead to a relative clause) and relative pronoun (part of the relative clause). Syntactic and prosodic evidence indicates that, at least in some instances, sá is unambiguously a relative pronoun, used in tandem with the particle er; thus Old Icelandic relative clauses seem to have doubly filled COMP. A notable characteristic of relative sá is its pervasive attraction to the case of the matrix antecedent. I argue that case attraction represents an intermediate stage in the reanalysis of sá from a demonstrative to a true relative pronoun. Structurally, case-attracting relative pronouns and true relative pronouns occupy different functional positions within a split-CP system. Sá achieved the final stage of the development in the seventeenth century, but rapidly declined under competition with the complementizer sem, thus leaving the false impression that sá never developed beyond the case-attraction stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the linguistic-cultural analysis of the Old Icelandic Rune-Poem. Each rune is presented as a complicated shaped token with the multilayer semantics which evolves to the microtext consequently. The intertextual links between the runic microtexts and other sacred texts of Old Germanic mythology, especially the eddaic mythological poems are given. The semantic and linguistic-cultural links between the runic symbols and the units of other sacred symbols in the Old Germanic linguoculture are demonstrated. The runic cultural pattern is analyzed as the integrated structure representing the world view of the Old Germanics.

It is commonly held that Present-Day English they, their, them are not descended from Old English but derive from the Old Norse third-person plural pronouns þeir, þeira, þeim. This paper argues that the early northern English orthographic and distributional textual evidence agrees with an internal trajectory for the ‘þ-’ type personal pronouns in the North and indicates an origin in the Old English demonstratives þā, þāra, þām. The Northern Middle English third-person plural pronominal system was the result of the reanalysis from demonstrative to personal pronoun that is common cross-linguistically in Germanic and non-Germanic languages alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After considerable debate, the International Ombudsman Association (IOA) chose to use the word 'ombudsman' in its name when it was formed in 2005. This word has Old Norse origins and was used by King Charles XII when he formed the first Ombudsman office for his government in Sweden in 1713. King Charles' model for the ombudsman office was inspired by the Mohtasib, a similar position that existed in the Ottoman Empire. The organizational ombudsman profession originated in the 1960's in America, and even though this new role departed in several significant ways from King Charles' vision, the title 'ombudsman' was still widely adopted by organizational ombuds offices. There have been concerns raised along the way that the 'man' suffix of the word is unnecessary and gendered. Recent cultural movements, such as #metoo, have brought increased attention to issues related to gender inequity within our culture and institutions, and many offices and organizations have already elected to use alternative titles for their offices such as 'ombuds' or 'ombudsperson', to make the title gender neutral. The author suggests that now is a good time for the IOA to drop the 'man' and use a non-gendered term like 'ombuds' in our title that better suits our current moment in history. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge Jim Laflin, Caroline Adams and Megan DeBrito for reading and providing helpful input with early drafts of this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present article, the author discusses two Old Norse texts that may indicate that the Sami cult of sieidis had spread to the neighbouring Old Norse culture in the period before the Christianization of Norway. One of these texts is found in the Older Eiðsifaþing law, the law of the inland part of Eastern Norway. According to this law, it was prohibited to believe in (the power of) the finnar (Sami), and among their powerful objects, rót (the root of a tree) is mentioned. This root is in all likelihood a Sami sieidi that was sought out by Norwegians for help, probably for medical reasons. The other text is a notice in the Icelandic Landnámabók in which it is mentioned that a settler from Northern Norway worshipped some stones in the outfields on the border of his settlement, called Gunnsteinar. There are closer parallels to this outfields cult in Sami culture than in Old Norse culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of personal religion among the ancient Scandinavians has centered around the concept of having a deity as one's fulltrúi 'trustworthy friend,' ástvinr 'close friend,' or vinr 'friend.' Most scholars of the twentieth century regarded the concept as a true expression of pre-Christian Germanic belief. By contrast, modern scholarship strongly tends to see it as a construct of medieval authors who took the saints' cult as a model to describe the personal piety of their ninth and tenth century compatriots. On the basis of a passage in the Old Norse translation of Clemens saga, corroborated with archaeological evidence and some skaldic verse, e.g. Sonatorrek, the present study argues that the religious concept of fulltrúi and its parallel terms developed in pre-Christian times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is examines the main traits of the Scandinavian ping (thing, assembly) institution, which was in place from the Viking Age onwards, and demonstrates that this system was not unique, but rather fits into the longstanding assembly traditions identified in both preliterate and literate Germanic societies in Mainland Europe. Even though the written sources are sparse and at times rather problematic, it is clear that the assembly as a form of early government, conflict resolution and court system existed across a wide geographical region and time span. The nature of the Scandinavian thing organisation is examined through regulations surrounding assembly organisation in the earliest surviving laws, above all the Norwegian laws of the Gulathing and the Frostathing. For the analysis of the early assembly systems of the European Mainland, a wider variety of written sources, ranging from Tacitus' Germania, saints' lives to a collections of early medieval laws including The Burgundian Code and The Laws of the Salian and Ripuarian Franks have been employed. Through this comparative approach, it is demonstrated that these different assembly organisations share a number of key features, despite being diving by time and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a new phonological and philological analysis of previously unexplained disharmonic patterns in Old Norwegian height harmony. Old Norwegian displays cross-linguistically rare forms of blocking and transparency, which under traditional assumptions of Old Norwegian vowels and vowel harmony are both phonologically and orthographically irregular. I show that these patterns make perfect phonological sense if we reinterpret the Old Norwegian neutral vowels æ-ǫ as [−low, −ATR] /ɛ, ɔ/ and assume that Old Norwegian height harmony was relativized to [high] contrastive visibility and bounded by high-sonority elements, resulting in the transparency of [high] non-contrastive items and blocking by high-sonority [+low] vowels. This featural interpretation fits with the later diachronic development of Old Norwegian vowels and additionally helps explain patterned spelling variation found in both roman and runic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metres are typically classified as being accentual (mapping stress, as in English) or quantitative (mapping weight, as in Sanskrit). This article treats the less well-studied typology of hybrid accentual-quantitative metres, which fall into two classes. In the first, stress and weight map independently onto the same metre, as attested in Latin and Old Norse. In the second, stress and weight interact, such that weight is regulated more strictly for stressed than unstressed syllables, as illustrated here by new analyses of Dravidian and Finno-Ugric metres. In both of these latter cases (as well as in Serbo-Croatian), strictness of weight-mapping is modulated gradiently by stress level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reviews web sites with databases on Indo-European languages including "The metrically Restored Rig Veda" at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin at http://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/, the collection of Old Norse texts titled "Heimskringla" created by Madsen et al., and the "Cognacy in Basic Lexicon project" available at http://www.shh.mpg.de/207610/cobldatabase.

Copyright of Romanian Journal for Baltic & Nordic Studies/Revista Romana de Studii Baltice si Nordice is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After his first edition of the Old French text Lai de l'Ombre in 1890, the Romance scholar Joseph Be'dier returned to the text in a revised edition in 1913. In the introduction to this edition, he claimed that he had become aware of a strange law: the great majority of stemmata proposed for Old French texts were bifurcating, i.e. they had two main branches. When he once more returned to this question in 1928, he claimed that of 110 stemmata he had encountered, 105 were bifurcating. Arrigo Castellani, another Romance scholar, revised this material in 1957, and came to somewhat lower numbers, but confirmed in general Be'dier's conclusion--of 86 stemmata, Castellani found that 71 were bifurcating. This article is an investigation into another vernacular tradition, the Old Norse one, i.e. Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian. The material presented here is based on the two major series published in Copenhagen, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana and Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, and it comes very close to the findings of Castellani--of 89 stemmata, 74 turned out to be bifurcating. The two main hypotheses of Be'dier are evaluated, and the conclusion is that the most likely explanation for the preponderance of bifurcating stemmata is the force of dichotomy inherent in the procedure of the stemmatic recension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the style that William Morris first developed for his translations from Old Norse between 1868 and 1876, and further refined in the early 1890s during his work on The Saga Library. After demonstrating how Morris gradually honed and insisted upon an ideal of literalness in his saga translations, it proposes that the style was intended to bridge the temporal and cultural gap between the imagined medieval Icelandic society that he celebrated in the sagas and the degraded British one that he lamented in the present. The article goes on to argue that Morris's increasingly diligent attempt to reconnect his readers with an erstwhile kindred culture through his translations from Old Norse may have been undermined by a misjudgement on his part of what his audience would recognize as familiar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This response mostly addresses the comments, but its main point is that nth c. "language contact" syntactic changes suggest that Norse was expanding while West Saxon was contracting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the approach referred to as the >No Blur Principle< (NBP), aka >Vocabular Clarity<. This approach can account for an otherwise unexpected case of diachronic productivity in Faroese verb conjugation, viz. the spreading of the suffix -i in the present tense 3rd sg., not associated with the largest class. Even if the NBP is meant as a synchronic restriction, the paper shows some consequences for diachrony -- yielding the right >predictions< (in a weak sense of the word). Given the NBP analysis of Old Norse, there is a good reason why the suffix -a, at first sight a much better candidate for productivity (as it is associated with a more type-frequent class than -i), could not spread -- at least not without extensive >reshuffling< of the affixes first; no such reshuffling was necessary for the spreading of -i, which was the >class-default< affix anyway. The traditional account of the spreading of Faroese -i,which goes back to Rask (1811, p. 279), has it that this spreading is due to influence from the subjunctive. This is problematic, because one would not normally expect affixes to spread from the subjunctive to the indicative, and because a similar development in some few dialects of Norwegian cannot plausibly be accounted for along such lines. While the NBP account does not exclude Rask's hypothesis, it can help us overcome these problems. The fact that the NBP helps us answer questions of productivity must count in its favour, and some other arguments in its favour are also marshalled. The Faroese development also shows that productivity for affixes and words need not behave in identical fashion; thus supporting a theoretical distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study in intraparadigmatic variation. It begins with a fine-grained morphological decomposition of the reinforced demonstrative pronoun in Old Norse. Five distinct morphemes are identified, and it is shown that there are three patterns into which these morphemes can be assembled within the paradigm. Applying Cinque's () U20 theory of movement, it is then shown that the three different structures observed in the reinforced demonstrative paradigm are derived from a single functional sequence of four syntactic heads. Interestingly, a morphological reflex of the cyclic/roll-up divide is identified in the process. Finally, an account is provided for why only these three structures appear in the paradigm in the first place. Overall the paper argues that Cinque's () theory of syntactic movement can be applied also at the morphological level and ultimately that syntax and morphology are governed by the same principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Celtische Philologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many explanations have been proposed for the dative singular in -u in Old Norse ō-stems. Most of these take as their starting point a Proto- Germanic instrumental in *-ō, PIE *-ā. Such an ending, however, should according to the established laws for syncope in Nordic result in an Old Norse zero ending. This article reveals the many problems researchers have encountered attempting to back up the traditional explanation. Instead it argues that the dative in -u must stem from a Proto-Norse ending covered by a nasal, *-ōn or *-un, where the vowel later got nasalized and therefore was preserved as -u in Old Norse. This nasal-ending of Proto-Norse could in turn be connected with the Balto-Slavic instrumentals in -mi, Plural -mis, for which in Germanic there have so far only been found cognates in the dative plural. The ultimate source for the Old Norse dative in -u could either be a PIE ā-stem instrumental in *-āmi, which would give the proposed Proto-Norse ending *-ōn, or a PIE consonantal stem instrumental in *-mi, which, with the addition of an analogical -u- between stem and ending, would give Proto-Norse *-un. In the latter case, the ending must have been transferred analogically from the consonantal stems to the ō-stems during the Proto-Norse period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One consistent finding across sociolinguistic studies is the tendency for female speakers to lead in ongoing change. Different explanations have been proposed for this and a key method of testing these explanations is to identify whether the pattern occurs in the languages of a wider range of societies than have been studied thus far. Historical societies are relatively understudied in this regard, but undertaking variationist research into gender in historical varieties presents many challenges. One way to overcome these is to examine variation internal to fiction data. This paper presents an analysis of the effect of gender on the adverb selected for sentential negation in Old Norse prose fiction. It finds that female characters lead consistently in this change over time. In doing so, it demonstrates the feasibility of using fiction data when examining the effect of gender in historical varieties such as Old Norse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corpora when used with sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present IceMorph, a semi-supervised morphosyntactic analyzer of Old Icelandic. In addition to machine-read corpora and dictionaries, it applies a small set of declension prototypes to map corpus words to dictionary entries. A web-based GUI allows expert users to modify and augment data through an online process. A machine learning module incorporates prototype data, edit-distance metrics, and expert feedback to continuously update part-of-speech and morphosyntactic classification. An advantage of the analyzer is its ability to achieve competitive classification accuracy with minimum training data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of prestige in the contact of English with its most important donor languages, Celtic, Old Norse, French, and Latin, in this order. It shows that the prestige of a donor language can only partly be correlated with its stratal relation to the recipient language. Moreover, it demonstrates that by focussing on the stratal relation of a donor language with its recipient language under specific historical and social conditions, the likely motivations for borrowing can be ascertained with greater explanatory precision. The arguments presented are based on various kinds of comparative assessments of the evidence for language contact, namely (1) evidence from different donor languages of English, (2) evidence from one and the same donor language in different periods, and (3) evidence from English and other recipient languages in response to the same donor language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that there is no reason to believe that full NP Object Shift (NPOS) was not found in Old Norse (Old Icelandic) nor that it is more common in Modern Icelandic than in earlier stages of the language. In addition, it is claimed that NPOS is also an option in Modern Faroese, contrary to common belief, although it is much more restricted in Faroese than in Icelandic. These results demonstrate the usefulness of systematic corpus studies while at the same time reminding us of their limits. In addition, they shed a new light on the status of Faroese among the Scandinavian languages and on the nature of intra-speaker variation and grammar competition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the Old Norse concept of ógøfa, or misfortune, as used in 13th-century Iceland. According to the author, this term had emotional connotations and could be used to describe a person's inner conflicts and guilt. Particular focus is given to the term as applied to the legendary character Gísli Súrsson. Other topics include anxiety, distress, and social and moral conflicts. Shame and Christianity are also discussed.

This article analyses the evidence behind the Norse derivation of OE hōre (PDE whore) and related terms (cp. ON hóra 'adulteress, harlot'). After establishing that the terms probably referred to promiscuity and moral depravity rather than prostitution per se, the article explores the eleventh-centuU contexts where the terms are recorded: the Old English glosses to Aldhelm's Prosa de uirginitate in Brussels, Bibliothèquc royale, MS 1650, and Oxford, Bodleian Librau, MS Digby 146, and the works of Archbishop Wulfstan II of York. The Norse-derived terms recorded in these texts belong to specific technolects (e.g. legal, monetary', and social terms), and, therefore, it is argued, their presence cannot be taken as strong evidence in favour of the Norse orion of the non-technical terms under consideration. The article concludes that, when this is considered together with the fact that there exist cognates for the terms in other Germanic languages and that the late attestation of the terms might be due to their informal, 'demotic', character rather than to their foreign etymology, there is not much evidence in favour of interpreting the terms as Norse derived. It is hoped that this approach will urge scholars to adopt similar caution when deeding with English terms whose late attestation is the main source of evidence for their suggested Norse origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary is borrowed. Borrowing is a distinctly non-tree-like process—akin to horizontal gene transfer in genome evolution—that cannot be recovered by phylogenetic trees. Here, we infer the frequency of hidden borrowing among 2346 cognates (etymologically related words) of basic vocabulary distributed across 84 Indo-European languages. The dataset includes 124 (5%) known borrowings. Applying the uniformitarian principle to inventory dynamics in past and present basic vocabularies, we find that 1373 (61%) of the cognates have been affected by borrowing during their history. Our approach correctly identified 117 (94%) known borrowings. Reconstructed phylogenetic networks that capture both vertical and horizontal components of evolutionary history reveal that, on average, eight per cent of the words of basic vocabulary in each Indo-European language were involved in borrowing during evolution. Basic vocabulary is often assumed to be relatively resistant to borrowing. Our results indicate that the impact of borrowing is far more widespread than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the transition from a system with contrastive, segmental quantity in Old Norse into the present day system characterizing most Norwegian and Swedish dialects, where stressed syllables are obligatorily bimoraic. Starting with variation within East Norwegian, two intermediate varieties between Old Norse and the modern system are identified, and the four varieties are then related to each other by means of constraint reranking within an Optimality Theory analysis. A full factorial typology based on the four constraints involved is then developed. This renders four possible intermediate stages between Old Norse and the modern system, of which two are attested in East Norwegian. When the scope subsequently is widened to all varieties of Norwegian and Swedish, it is shown that all the intermediate varieties predicted by the analysis are attested. More importantly, no other varieties than those predicted seem to exist, even if such varieties can be construed. This suggests that the grammar developed to account for the changes not only is empirically adequate, but also has explanatory value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the etymological histories of words related to nautical life, including tack, luff, beat to the windward, and cruise. He uses information from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to show discuss the earliest usage of the words. The verb luff was first seen in the book 'Confessio Amantis" by John Gower to refer to the act of altering the course of a ship. The tack is traced to the Old Norse word "taka" and the Middle English word "takel." The word cruise comes from either the Germanic or the Romance languages. Topics include Anglo-Norman words, the Old Norse language, and changing definitions for nautical terms.

In this article we show that the semantic characterization of the English ditransitive construction, primarily based on the concept of transfer and generally assumed in the international literature within Construction Grammar, is insufficient for the remaining branches of Germanic, in particular for the West-Scandinavian languages, both modern and ancient. On the basis of our findings from West-Scandinavian we suggest eight semantic subconstructions of the ditransitive construction, which in turn can be divided into 17 different narrowly-circumscribed semantic verb classes. We depict the semantics of the construction on a semantic map, and lay out the internal structure of the construction on a lexicality--schematicity hierarchy where both higher-level generalizations and lower-level idiosyncrasies are captured. Finally, we investigate a specific subconstruction of the ditransitive in Norwegian, the V-REFL-NP construction, which shows certain idiosyncratic properties, not derivable from any general or specific syntactic rules of Norwegian, nor from the semantics of the individual parts. We conclude that a constructional analysis is needed to satisfactorily account for all the facts of the ditransitive construction in Norwegian and West-Scandinavian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]