NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 76, Issue 1, 2023

This paper focuses on the inflectional morphology of Latin masculine proper names in Old English. Most common Latin loans are perfectly integrated into the Old English system. Latin proper names, however, like late scholarly loans, show both Latin and Old English inflectional endings in an apparently chaotic distribution. By analysing a selection of 833 tokens from The Old English Martyrology, this paper shows that despite variation, a clear pattern resulting from a combination of the Latin and Old English systems can be detected. While the inflectional endings of one language dominate in some cases, e.g. Latin in the nominative and Old English in the dative, other inflections, e.g. the genitive thematic vowel + ‑s, result from a combination of both languages based on phonetic or spelling similarities. The result is a mixed paradigm predominantly modelled after Old English a-stem nouns.

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.

In 2020 a large gold hoard was discovered in Vindelev, Jutland, Denmark, containing almost 800g of gold. Among the hoard’s artefacts are six runic bracteates discussed here. Two bracteates give important contributions to central discussions in bracteate research. IK 737 is similar to the well-known bracteate IK 58 from Funen. It demonstrates that the much-discussed sequence does not read houaz, but rather horaz, weakening its direct connection to Óðinn through one of his many bynames. IK 738 has one of the best executed inscriptions on a bracteate. The inscription consists of 34 runes (including bind-runes) and its final sequence ‘He/who [is] Óðin’s man’ is a crucial contribution to the discussion of who is depicted on the bracteates, Óðinn or a king? The wording rather indicates the latter.