Old Norse loanwords in modern Irish

This study questions the received wisdom that surviving Old Norse loanwords in modern Irish are fewer than 50 in number and are mostly shipping-related. The eventual goal is a complete survey of all Old Norse loanwords still “in common use in modern Irish” (Greene 1976: 80), since nothing of the sort has been found in the literature. In the interim, this study proposes a list of 67 words, extant in modern Irish only insofar as they are attested in the principal modern dictionaries, and which in light of available evidence are “of probable Old Norse origin” by direct borrowing. For quantitative purposes, these are counted on the basis of one Irish word per Old Norse etymon and are categorised into semantic domains according to the framework of the Loanword Typology Project (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009), itself an adaptation of the semantic domains proposed in Buck (1949). It is demonstrated that Old Norse loanwords in Irish overwhelmingly belong to the broad category of “culture vocabulary” but are not majoritarily connected with shipping. The main study is followed by a qualitative description of patterns of formal and semantic change observed in the data. These include derivational developments, diachronic semantic changes since Middle Irish, cross-domain semantic shifts and synchronic polysemies in modern Irish. The discussion focuses on extra-linguistic causal explanations for change, but also suggests that some mainstays of cognitive lexical semantics such as prototypicality and radial networks are better-equipped than fixedly categorial semantic domains to account for change after borrowing.