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Middle English occupational terms with Scandinavian word stems: Functional, semantic and chronological issues

Paper · 2020 · Dobrovolska Oksana

Summary

The paper looks at Middle English words for occupations that are loan-blends, meaning a Scandinavian borrowed stem combined with native word-building material. It asks how these words were used, which kinds of trades they named, and when they first appear in writing. The author gathered the items from historical dictionaries: the MED, the OED (NED) and Reaney's Dictionary of British Surnames. Each term was assigned to one of three functional groups: common nouns that classify, proper names that identify, or words used both ways. The terms were then grouped by meaning and dated by first attestation. Out of 2,417 Middle English occupational terms, 184 are loan-blends with Scandinavian stems. Most of them served to identify people, typically as bynames, and names of artisans dominate. New formations rise in the 13th–14th centuries and fall off in the 15th. The study matters because 97 of these words survive only as personal names, so onomastic records turn out to be essential evidence for reconstructing the medieval lexicon.

Key points

  • The corpus contains 2,417 Middle English occupational terms. Of these, 184 are loan-blends with Scandinavian stems, which is 24.5% of all loan-blends and about 8% of all occupational terms.
  • 97 Scandinavian-stem loan-blends are known only from proper names. The conclusion puts them at about 4% of all occupational terms and 13% of loan-blends, while the abstract's "13% of all occupational terms" appears to be a slip.
  • An earlier study (Dobrovolska, 2018) gives the origins of all loan-blend stems: Central French 31.5%, Scandinavian 24.5%, Latin/French 20%, Latin 12%, Norman 7%, Low Germanic 4% and Celtic 1%.
  • In every semantic subgroup, the Scandinavian-stem items are mostly identifying, name-like uses, and names of artisans form the largest subgroup.
  • First attestations rise in the 13th–14th centuries and decline in the 15th, which matches the overall pattern for Middle English occupational terms and loan-blends.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Surnames serve as a fossil record: words that left no trace as common nouns can still be recovered from personal names, which widens the evidence base for a lexicon.
  • I2. Each word is labelled by nominative function (classifying common noun, identifying name, or both) instead of treating it as a single item.
  • I3. Hybrid formations are studied separately: a borrowed stem plus a native affix or compound element is tracked as its own category.
  • I4. Lexical items are dated by first written attestation, and these dates are aggregated by century to show the rise and fall of word-formation.
  • I5. Every grouping is reported with both absolute counts and percentages across functional, semantic and chronological slices.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Occupational surnames such as Smith, Baker or Fletcher could be linked to their trade concepts in the ontology, so a name can optionally suggest a role without being forced to.
  • I2 (frames): Coreference and role assignment could carry a "name vs. role-noun" flag, so that "the miller" and "Miller" are handled differently but can still be connected.
  • I3 (tokens): The morphology module could split agent nouns into stem origin and native suffix (-er, -ster, -man), making lemmatization of rare or archaic agent nouns explainable.
  • I4 (world): Compiled knowledge could store first-attestation periods on lexical entries, helping readers of older tales flag anachronistic or archaic senses.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation reports could follow the same pattern, giving raw counts and shares for each slice (genre, construction type) so that skewed subsets stay visible.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Kyiv International University.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Dobrovolska Oksana. 2020. Middle English occupational terms with Scandinavian word stems: Functional, semantic and chronological issues. Topics in Linguistics 21.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.2478/topling-2020-0011

@inproceedings{oksana2020middle,
  title = {{Middle English occupational terms with Scandinavian word stems: Functional, semantic and chronological issues}},
  author = {Dobrovolska Oksana},
  booktitle = {Topics in Linguistics 21},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.2478/topling-2020-0011},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.2478/topling-2020-0011}
}

References

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