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This Festschrift is dedicated to Veturliði G. Óskarsson, Uppsala professor of Scandinavian Languages with a focus on Icelandic, on his sixty-fifth birthday, 25 March, 2023. Eleven colleagues based in three different Nordic countries have written contributions in Icelandic, Swedish, English, and Norwegian, touching on different aspects of Veturliði’s research interests: Lexicology and etymology: Katrín Axelsdóttir (University of Iceland), Enn um ald(u)rnara (Ald(u)rnari once again); Margrét Jónsdóttir (University of Iceland, emerita), Orðið féskylft (About the word féskylft ‘insolvent’); Matteo Tarsi (Uppsala University), Naming the elements in the Nordic languages (Swedish, Danish, Icelandic) until 1945; Morphology: Þorsteinn G.Indriðason (University of Bergen), Hvorfor er suffikset -legur såpass produktivt i islandsk? En historisk utgreiing (Why is the derivational suffix -legur so productive in Icelandic? A diachronic study); Nordic Philology: Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir (University of Iceland), Guðrúnarbrögð hin nýju (A new lay of Guðrún); Heimir Pálsson (Uppsala University, emeritus), Forn nöfn — fornöfn (Old names — pronomina); Henrik Williams (Uppsala University), Vart tog Röskva vägen? (What became of Röskva?); Lasse Mårtensson (Uppsala University), Dvergatal i Uppsala-Eddan (The catalogue of dwarves in the Uppsala Edda); and Michael Schulte (University of Agder), Between the pagan past and the Christian future; Sociolinguistics: Ari Páll Kristinsson (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), Bonds and Boundaries and Helga Hilmisdóttir (The Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies), Språkkontakt och pragmatik: En empirisk undersökning av pragmatiska lån i isländska tonårspojkars samtal (Language contact and pragmatics: An empirical study of pragmaticloans in the speech of Icelandic teenagers).

This article examines the acquisition of Swedish and Danish linguistic terminology. Onomasiological in nature, the data gathering for these two languages follows that carried out for Icelandic in an earlier study (Tarsi 2022a). The analytical model used builds on that employed in Tarsi (2022b), and the major innovation introduced here is a categorization of loanword typology based on intralexical chronology rather than on external factors (primary vs. secondary borrowings instead of necessity vs. prestige borrowings, respectively). The main findings of the article are: (1) Shared borrowings tend to be primary in Swedish but secondary in Danish; (2) the two languages show differing degrees of adaptation for loanwords, especially seen in the case of Latinate terminology, a phenomenon not found in Icelandic; (3) Swedish and Danish model their linguistic terminology to a great extent on the same languages, Latin and German, whereas Latin and Danish are the most prominent model languages for Icelandic; finally (4) in both languages there is a flourishing of native terminology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comparable in quantity and quality to that appearing in contemporary Icelandic data.

The article analyzes the names for the chemical elements discovered from antiquityuntil 1945. The etymology of each of the names, which total 96, is given in Section2, together with bibiographical information about their first appearance. In a number ofcases, more names were coined, and, whenever this is still reflected in some languages, itis accounted for (conversely, names such as columbium for niobium are disregarded asthey do not consistute offical names). In the discussion section, the names for the elementsin the three Nordic languages are comparatively analyzed with regard to 1) lexical strategies;2) loanword acquisition; and 3) word formation.

This article challenges Fischer’s 1909 implied proposal that OIcel. kærr [9th/10th c.+] is a North French, Picardian, loan. Fischer’s etymology, which was preceded and inspired by Jessen’s 1893 work on Danish, is rejected on the phonological grounds that the initial plosive in Icelandic is palatal and not velar, cf. orthographies such as ⟨kiær⟩. Moreover, it is also demonstrated that Picardian, actually, could show an incipient palatalization of /k/ in that phonological context, as shown by orthographies such as ⟨kier⟩, so that Fischer’s initial assumption was faulty to begin with. The inadequacy of the “Picardian hypothesis” is demonstrated by reference to two other French loans, katel [1250+] and kisill [14th c., hapax]. The former, which in theory could be a loan from Picardian, is a Middle English (or even Latin) borrowing, whereas the latter, for which a Picardian source word is not attested, shows that the outcome of the adaptation process of [c] or [t͡ʃ] is invariably OIcel. /c/. A further external argument is that, in light of Icelandic and Scandinavian history, one cannot assume that both kærr and katel are loans from Picardian, because that would entail an early Picardian influence in Scandinavia which only continued in Iceland well into the thirteenth century.

The article addresses a selection of meanings fundamental to linguistic discourse in Icelandic. Their diverse lexical manifestations were collected from twenty-four works, produced during eight centuries: from the First Grammatical Treatise (1130–1140) to Alexander Jóhannesson’s Frumnorræn málfræði (1920), by which time current grammatical terminology had for the most part reached its “modern” state. The excerpted data is analyzed with regard to its internal organization, by exploring the nature of its systematization, the strategies employed in coining grammatical terminology, and the relationship between current Icelandic grammatical terminology and medieval and early-modern terminology. From the analysis it becomes clear that: (1) calquing (mostly structural) and autonomous word coinage are the most prolific strategies, whereas borrowing and the employment of inherited lexemes are marginal; (2) Latin is the principal direct model for terms, and Danish constitutes another important source. Direct influence of Ælfrician terminology on the Old Icelandic grammatical lexicon is questionable; (3) the terminology currently used primarily comprises terms stemming from the 19th, and to a lesser extent the 18th century, with medieval terminology still being employed only in the case of very basic terms.

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.