On loanwords of Latin origin in contemporary Icelandic

Abstract

This article focuses on the Icelandic lexis' history by analysing the loanwords of Latin origin in it. The corpus examined traverses the history of Icelandic through its whole. The borrowings are divided into four main waves, excluding the pre­literary period. Each wave is dominated by one or two borrowing languages. The semantic fields Icelandic selects loanwords from are various and no field is strictly bound to any of the four waves above mentioned. Finally, some words of particular interest are presented and discussed, for the importance they assume in the light of the Icelandic lexis' history.