--- title: "Rec. av Matteo Tarsi. Loanwords and Native Words in Old and" description: "She proposes releasing the material as a searchable database. 2 references. Among them: 0." authors: ["Simonetta Battista"] year: 2025 venue: "Scripta Islandica 76" source: "https://publicera.kb.se/scis/article/view/62599" doi: "10.63092/scis.76.62599" licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Scripta Islandica)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/battista-2025-rec-av-matteo-tarsi-loanwords/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/battista-2025-rec-av-matteo-tarsi-loanwords/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/17/) / Rec. av Matteo Tarsi. Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550 # Rec. av Matteo Tarsi. Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550 **Authors:** Simonetta Battista · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** Scripta Islandica 76 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Scripta Islandica)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.63092/scis.76.62599) · [PDF](https://publicera.kb.se/scis/article/download/62599/50906) · [DOI 10.63092/scis.76.62599](https://doi.org/10.63092/scis.76.62599) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7117464411) **Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary This is Simonetta Battista's review of Matteo Tarsi's 2022 monograph on how borrowed and native vocabulary interacted in Icelandic from the first written records (around 1150) to the 1540 New Testament translation by Oddur Gottskálksson. Tarsi argues that the competition between foreign and home-grown words predates the era of linguistic purism. In his view it arose mainly from practical lexical needs, such as coining transparent words for new concepts. The book collects word pairs from 40 prose texts spanning ten genres. For each pair it gives etymology, meaning and a probable motive for the borrowing, and it classifies the native member with a fixed taxonomy. The terminology follows Gusmani and Betz. Battista praises the corpus as consistent and representative and calls the book a valuable reference. She also criticises it: - the genre-by-genre layout causes repetition and heavy cross-referencing; - synonyms are handled only in pairs; - some readings and lemmas are not checked against ONP or the Latin sources. She proposes releasing the material as a searchable database. ## Key points - The corpus has 40 texts or selections in 10 genres, from religious and legal texts to legendary sagas. It is analysed in 8 chapters, with the chivalric and legendary sagas merged into one chapter. - **Loanwords** are split into adapted loans and unintegrated "integral" loans. **Native words** are split into calques (semantic or structural), neoformations and inherited lexemes. Nonce borrowings and scribal Latin abbreviations are treated as marginal cases. - A "word pair" is defined broadly and covers three cases: - alternation within a text or across manuscript variants (intrastemmatic variation); - explicative insertions; - synonymic dittologies joined by "and/or". - Texts are dated by presumed composition date, unlike ONP's oldest-manuscript dating. First attestations are cited using SkP and ONP abbreviations. - Battista's corrections include three cases: - **forgildi:** by the Latin parallel in Gemma animæ, it likely renders præparatio, not a synonym of formál. - **Leviathan gloss:** ONP lemmatises it as miðgarðarormr, which Tarsi does not discuss. - **skytidýr:** it does occur in Alfræði Íslenzk, where ONP reads it as skyti. ## Interesting ideas - Tarsi treats a foreign term followed by a native explanatory gloss as its own evidence type, separate from mere co-occurrence; such inserted glosses are a strong signal that two expressions are meant to denote the same thing. - Battista shows that checking the source-language parallel can split an apparent synonym pair into two words that render two different source concepts. - The review argues that analysing near-synonyms only two at a time fragments the picture, and that whole synonym sets should be compared together. - Tarsi separates a text's composition date from the date of its oldest surviving witness and uses gaps between first attestations to guess which word came first. - Battista suggests replacing static printed tables with a searchable database that users can query with their own criteria and that can be extended over time. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (frames): Appositive glosses like "X, that is Y" or "X or Y" could be detected in the tree and fed to coreference as same-referent links, with the gloss pattern recorded as the explanation. - **I2** (learn): Silver synonym or paraphrase labels could be validated against an aligned source or second witness, and pairs whose alignment points to distinct concepts would be rejected as negative controls. - **I3** (world): Lexical alternatives in the ontology should be stored as sets with per-member nuances rather than pairwise links, so one entity naming can be explained against all its competitors at once. - **I4** (world): Compiled knowledge entries could carry both "source date" and "evidence date" provenance, so ordering claims about the knowledge stay explainable and auditable. - **I5** (tokens): Lemma and morphology resources would benefit from being kept as a queryable store with attestation metadata, rather than fixed lists, so new examples can be added and inspected. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* 📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works ## Cite Cite as: Simonetta Battista. 2025. Rec. av Matteo Tarsi. Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550. Scripta Islandica 76. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{battista2025rec, title = {{Rec. av Matteo Tarsi. Loanwords and Native Words in Old and Middle Icelandic. A Study in the History and Dynamics of the Icelandic Medieval Lexicon, from the Twelfth Century to 1550}}, author = {Simonetta Battista}, booktitle = {Scripta Islandica 76}, year = {2025}, doi = {10.63092/scis.76.62599}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63092/scis.76.62599} } ``` - [← previous Rdgai: Classifying transcriptional changes using Large Language Models with a test case from an Arabic Gospel tradition](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/turnbull-2025-rdgai-classifying-transcriptional-changes-using/) - [next → Referential continuity in the Scolinter corpus of French and Italian school writing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/barletta-2025-analyse-de-la-continuite-referentielle/) - [↑ back to papers of 2025](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2025/page/17/) ## References 2 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Beckman, N. & Kålund, Kr. (ed.), 1914–1916: Rímtǫl. (STUAGNL 41.) København. de Leeuw van Weenen, Andrea (ed. & ed. facs.), 1993; The Icelandic Homily Book. Perg. 15 4° in the Royal Library, Stockholm. (ÍH quarto 3.) Reykjavík. de Leeuw van Weenen, Andrea, 2004: Lemmatized Index to the Icelandic Homily Book. Perg. 15 4° in the Royal Library, Stockholm. (Rit Stofnunar Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi 61.) Reykjavík. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Beckman%2C+N%2E+%26+K%C3%A5lund%2C+Kr%2E+%28ed%2E%29%2C+1914%E2%80%931916%3A+R%C3%ADmt%C7%ABl%2E+%28STUAGNL+41%2E%29+K%C3%B8benhavn%2E+de+Leeuw+van+Weenen%2C+Andrea+%28ed%2E+%26+ed%2E+facs%2E%29%2C+1993%3B+The+Icelandic+Homily+Book%2E+Perg%2E+15+4%C2%B0+in+the+Royal+Library%2C+Stockholm) 2. Migne, J.-P. (ed.), 1854: Honorius Augustodunensis: Opera omnia. (Patrologia latina 172.) Paris. ONP = Ordbog over det norrøne prosasprog \ SkP = The Skaldic Project \<[https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=skaldic](https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=skaldic)> [↗](https://skaldic.org/m.php?p=skaldic) *Updated 29 October 2026*