Leita
Leita í textum Íslenska málfræðifélagsins    Leita í öllu efni á Kvisti

Ske

Höfundur:	Veturliði Óskarsson
Birtist í:	Íslensku máli og almennri málfræði: 19.-20. árgangi, 1997-1998, bls. 190 - 207

Útdráttur

Ske

A committee appointed by the Icelandic minister of education to set out guiding lines for Icelandic language policy wrote a report in 1986 outlining such a policy. In this report it says among other things that one should be on one’s guard against linguistic changes that could “change the linguistic system” of Icelandic.

As an example of such changes the report mentions changes that could affect the phonological system of the language. The common thread of this policy is seen to be the desire to preserve the “historical continuity” of the Icelandic language. Fleshing out the details of this policy with respect to the treatment of loanwords, Baldur Jónsson (1997; Baldur was actually one of the members of the language policy committee mentioned above) suggested five requirements that loanwords should meet:

(i)
a. Stress on the first syllable.
b. Adherence to the rules of Icelandic phonology.
c. Adherence to the phonotactic rules of Icelandic.
d. Adherence to the rules of the Icelandic inflectional morphology (i.e., it
should be possible to inflect the word like a native Icelandic word).
e. Spelling with letters of the Icelandic alphabet in a conventional fashion.

With these requirements in mind, the present paper discusses one Icelandic loanword, namely the verb ske ‘happen’ (cf. Danish ske, German geschehen). This verb has frequently been frowned upon by Icelandic purists and the paper cites numerous statements where it has been claimed that this verb violates phonological and morphological rules of Icelandic and should therefore not be used.

Then the history of this verb in Icelandic is traced (as far back as the 14th century) and it is argued that it does not, in fact, violate any rules of Icelandic and arguably meets all the requirements listed in (i) a–e above. Hence there do not appear to be any clear linguistic reasons to reject it.